Ethics and Suffering since the Holocaust: Making Ethics "First Philosophy" in Levinas, Wiesel and Rubenstein

For many, the Holocaust made thinking about ethics in traditional ways impossible. It called into question the predominance of speculative ontology in Western thought, and left many arguing that Western political, cultural and philosophical inattention to universal ethics were both a cause and an effect of European civilization's collapse in the twentieth century.

Emmanuel Levinas, Elie Wiesel and Richard Rubenstein respond to this problem by insisting that ethics must be Western thought's f...