Levinas article

The title will be “Levinas’s Threefold Critique of Heidegger,” and the venue will be Philosophy Today, presumably in 2010 (though sometimes they are surprisingly fast).

My last article on Levinas was on Otherwise Than Being, a couple of years ago. This one is on Totality and Infinity. The point is that Levinas criticizes Heidegger from three separate directions, not one. Heidegger is said to miss not only the ethical, but also the elemental and finally the substantial dimensions of reality.

Lingis published a pioneering article on the Levinasian theory of individual substances:

“A Phenomenology of Substances.” In American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. LXXI, No. 4 (1997).

That’s a really good article, one of his most significant in my opinion.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to repeat that Levinas stock is priced far too low. Sometimes it might seem like the opposite, because we’ve all heard The Other The Other The Other The Other The Other The Other The Other The Other The Other oh so many times by now. But Levinas is a lot bigger than that.

Sportswriters like to joke that basketball player Ben Wallace was called “underrated” for so many years that he finally became overrated. With Levinas it’s the opposite: he’s been called “overrated” by enough people that he is now certifiably underrated.

Levinas is one of those authors who is simply never, at no time, “full of sh*t,” something that can usually be said even about some very good philosophers at various points in their writings. There may be times when he strikes some people as too pious, but even at those moments he really means what he’s saying.

And besides, he’s still the best reader of Heidegger who ever lived.