4th and final Philosophy Today article now posted

“Levinas and the Triple Critique of Heidegger.” HERE.

I’m fond of this one. And I’ll continue to go to the mat to defend Levinas as one of the most important original post-WWII thinkers in the continental tradition. For me, Levinas is a more important figure for philosophy than either Derrida or Foucault (yes, I know that sounds too extreme to most people). And more– I think this is for reasons having nothing to do with “ethics.” It has to do with metaphysics, and metaphysics alone.

If I were going to place a sort of edgy, risky bet on what the history of philosophy will look like in 100 years, I think my first bet would be on Levinas standing the test of time a lot better than many of my friends think he will. So many people seem to view Levinas as just a preachy old finger-wagger who talks about God too much. That’s not the Levinas I know. Then again, the Levinas I know was encountered through Alphonso Lingis, who isn’t exactly a preachy old finger-wagger who talks about God too much. Maybe you need to encounter Levinas through Lingis to be able to see Levinas as an utterly cutting-edge thinker, which is exactly the way I see him.

But back to the article itself. I gave it originally as a paper at a Levinas conference in Sofia, Bulgaria in October 2006. We were supposed to put those papers in a conference volume, but after a couple of years the conference organizers admitted that there were insuperable delays with that project and released me to place the article elsewhere. Very kind of them to do so.