Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas was one of the most influential philosophers and ethicists of the last century. Born in Kaunas (in contemporary Lithuania), he moved to France in 1923, studying at Strasbourg and later at Freiburg. He was a student of the Austrian philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and a major influence on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Levinas taught at the University of Poitiers, the University of Paris, and the Sorbonne. During the Holocaust, Levinas, a French citizen, was imprisoned as a French-Jewish soldier; his parents and siblings were murdered in Kaunas, Lithuania. Delivered first as lectures after World War II, the essays collected in his book Time and the Other comprise descriptive studies of the emergence of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and time in terms of bodily existence, worldliness, eros, and the rupture and renewal of generations.