> the BORG sent me this in email, it's pretty "heavy":
>
> "Emanuelis Levinas (later adapted to French orthography as Emmanuel
> Lévinas) received a traditional Jewish education in Lithuania. After
> WWII, he studied the Talmud under the enigmatic "Monsieur Chouchani,"
> whose influence he acknowledged only late in his life, without giving
> all the credit due. The Torah taught by Levinas is basically the Torah
> he learned with Monsieur Chouchani.
>
> Lévinas began his philosophical studies at Strasbourg University in
> 1924, where he began his lifelong friendship with the French
> philosopher Maurice Blanchot. In 1928, he went to Freiburg University
> to study phenomenology under Edmund Husserl. At Freiburg he also met
> Martin Heidegger. Lévinas became one of the very first French
> intellectuals to draw attention to Heidegger and Husserl, by
> translating Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and by drawing on their
> ideas in his own philosophy, in works such as his The Theory of
> Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology, De l'Existence à l'Existant, and
> En Découvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger.
>
> According to his New York Times obituary, Lévinas came to regret his
> enthusiasm for Heidegger, because of the latter's Nazism. During a
> lecture on forgiveness, Lévinas stated "One can forgive many Germans,
> but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult
> to forgive Heidegger."[1]
>
> After earning his doctorate Lévinas taught at a private Jewish High
> School in Paris, the École Normale Israélite Orientale, eventually
> becoming its director. He began teaching at the University of Poitiers
> in 1961, at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris in 1967,
> and at the Sorbonne in 1973, from which he retired in 1979. He was
> also a Professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.
>
> In the 1950s, Levinas emerged from the circle of intellectuals
> surrounding Jean Wahl as a leading French thinker. His work is based
> on the ethics of the Other or, in Lévinas' terms, on "ethics as first
> philosophy." For Lévinas, the Other is not knowable and cannot be made
> into an object of the self, as is done by traditional metaphysics
> (which Lévinas called "ontology"). Lévinas prefers to think of
> philosophy as the "wisdom of love" rather than the love of wisdom (the
> literal Greek meaning of the word "philosophy"). By his lights, ethics
> becomes an entity independent of subjectivity to the point where
> ethical responsibility is integral to the subject; hence an ethics of
> responsibility precedes any "objective searching after truth."
>
> Lévinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the
> encounter with the Other. For Lévinas, the irreducible relation, the
> epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a
> privileged phenomenon in which the other person's proximity and
> distance are both strongly felt. "The Other precisely reveals himself
> in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial
> phenomenon of gentleness."[2]. At the same time, the revelation of the
> face makes a demand, this demand is before one can express, or know
> one's freedom, to affirm or deny. One instantly recognizes the
> transcendence and heteronomy of the Other. Even murder fails as an
> attempt to take hold of this otherness.
>
> In Lévinas' later thought following "Totality and Infinity", he argued
> that our responsibility for-the-other was already rooted within our
> subjective constitution. It should be noted that the first line of the
> preface of this book is "everyone will readily agree that it is of the
> highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality."[3]
> This can be seen most clearly in his later account of recurrence
> (chapter 4 in "Otherwise Than Being"), where Lévinas maintained that
> subjectivity was formed in and through our subjected-ness to the
> other. In this way, his effort was not to move away from traditional
> attempts to locate the other within subjectivity (this he agrees
> with), so much as his view was that subjectivity was primordially
> ethical and not theoretical. That is to say, our responsibility for-
> the-other was not a derivative feature of our subjectivity; instead,
> obligation founds our subjective being-in-the-world by giving it a
> meaningful direction and orientation. Lévinas' thesis "ethics is first
> philosophy", then, means that the traditional philosophical pursuit of
> knowledge is but a secondary feature of a more basic ethical duty to-
> the-other.
>
> The elderly Lévinas was a distinguished French public intellectual,
> whose books reportedly sold well. He had a major impact on the young
> Jacques Derrida, a fellow French Jew whose seminal Writing and
> Difference contains an essay, "Violence and Metaphysics," on Lévinas.
> Derrida also delivered a eulogy at Lévinas' funeral, later published
> as Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, an appreciation and exploration of
> Levinas's moral philosophy. Here, Derrida followed Bracha L.
> Ettinger's interpretation of Lévinas' notion of femininity and
> transformed his own earlier reading of this subject accordingly"
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_L%%C3%%A9vinas
>
> "It was mainly during the fifties that Levinas began to work out a
> highly original philosophy of ethics with the aim of going beyond the
> ethically neutral tradition of ontology. Levinas's first magnum opus,
> Totality and Infinity (1961), influenced in part by the dialogical
> philosophies of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, sought to
> accomplish this departure through an analysis of the "face-to-face"
> relation with the Other. At the center of the work is the claim that
> the Other is not knowable, but calls into question and challenges the
> complacency of the self through Desire, language, and the concern for
> justice. This claim and others were further elaborated in Levinas's
> second magnum opus, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), an
> immensely challenging and sophisticated work that seeks to push
> philosophical intelligibility to the limit in an effort to lessen the
> inevitable concessions made to ontology and the tradition. It is this
> work that is generally considered Levinas's most important
> contribution to the contemporary debate surrounding the closure of
> metaphysical discourse, much commented upon by Jacques Derrida, for
> example."
>

>

> ok i lied. (the BORG did not email me this) i do that often. but i
> probably lie less than lots of other people do.
>

> HTH.