20 Facts About Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas was born on 12 January 1906, into a middle-class Litvak family in Kaunas, in present-day Lithuania, then Kovno district, at the Western edge of the Russian Empire.

Emmanuel Levinas began his philosophical studies at the University of Strasbourg in 1923, and his lifelong friendship with the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot.

Emmanuel Levinas spent the rest of World War II as a prisoner of war in a camp near Hanover in Germany.

Emmanuel Levinas was assigned to a special barrack for Jewish prisoners, who were forbidden any form of religious worship.

Blanchot, at considerable personal risk, saw to it that Emmanuel Levinas was able to keep in contact with his immediate family through letters and other messages.

Emmanuel Levinas participated in 1957 at the International Meeting at the monastery of Toumliline, a conference focused on contemporary challenges and interfaith dialogue.

Emmanuel Levinas 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.

Emmanuel Levinas published his second major philosophical work, Autrement qu'etre ou au-dela de l'essence, in 1974.

Emmanuel Levinas was a professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.

Emmanuel Levinas explicitly framed several of his mature philosophical works as attempts to respond to Heidegger's philosophy in light of its ethical failings.

Emmanuel Levinas's son is the composer Michael Levinas, and his son-in-law is the French mathematician Georges Hansel.

Emmanuel Levinas's work is based on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas's terms, on "ethics as first philosophy".

Emmanuel Levinas prefers to think of philosophy as the "wisdom of love" rather than the "love of wisdom".

Emmanuel Levinas derives the primacy of his ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other.

For Emmanuel Levinas, 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.

Subjectivity, Emmanuel Levinas argued, is primordially ethical, not theoretical: that is to say, responsibility for the other is not a derivative feature of subjectivity, but instead, founds subjective being-in-the-world by giving it a meaningful direction and orientation.

The elderly Emmanuel Levinas was a distinguished French public intellectual, whose books reportedly sold well.

Emmanuel Levinas had a major influence on the younger, but more well-known Jacques Derrida, whose seminal Writing and Difference contains an essay, "Violence and Metaphysics", that was instrumental in expanding interest in Levinas in France and abroad.

Emmanuel Levinas's works have been a source of controversy since the 1950s, when Simone de Beauvoir criticized his account of the subject as being necessarily masculine, as defined against a feminine other.

For three decades, Emmanuel Levinas gave short talks on Rashi, a medieval French rabbi, every Shabbat morning at the Jewish high school in Paris where he was the principal.