Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics

The French-Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) is today remembered as the central moralist of the twentieth century and remains a major presence in the contemporary humanities. In this book, written in lucid and jargon-free prose, Samuel Moyn provides a first and controversial history of the makings of his thought, and especially of his trademark concept of "the other."

Restoring Levinas to the intellectually rich and combative atmosphere of interwar Europe, Origins of the Other over...