Levinas

As the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas correctly observed, seeing someone else creates an ethical demand that would not exist if that person were not in front of me.

David Couzens Hoy states that Emmanuel Levinas 's writings on the face of the Other and Derrida 's meditations on the relevance of death to ethics are signs of the "ethical turn" in Continental philosophy that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s.

Emmanuel Levinas in 1929 gave a presentation at one of Husserl's last seminars in Freiburg.

Hoy describes Levinas's account as "not the attempt to use power against itself, or to mobilize sectors of the population to exert their political power; the ethical resistance is instead the resistance of the powerless"(2004, p. 8).

Levinas also condemned Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism, stating: "One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive.

Levinas asked whether the idea of absolutism survived after the Holocaust, which he proposed it did.

Levinas was deeply influenced by Heidegger, and yet became one of his fiercest critics, contrasting the infinity of the good beyond being with the immanence and totality of ontology.

To Levinas, "transcending ethics" seems like a loophole to excuse would-be murderers from their crime and thus is unacceptable.