Escape to Judaism: Levinas’s First Steps toward Becoming a Jewish Thinker
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: This paper recontextualizes Emmanuel Levinas’s intellectual journey of the 1930s, focusing on his first philosophical and Jewish writings and his initial criticism of Martin Heidegger. It demonstrates Levinas’s philosophical transformation using newly discovered texts alongside published writings. These texts illustrate the early stage of his philosophical development and its connection to his first involvements with Jewish thought. An English translation of a newly discovered radio talk Levinas gave in 1937 is appended. This lecture enables a glimpse into the historical and philosophical context of the journey taken by a young immigrant Jewish philosopher in the intellectual scene of 1930s Paris.
Author: Niv Perelsztejn
Institution: University of Haifa
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4402781505