Eric S. Nelson

At a time of great and increasing interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this volume draws readers into what Levinas described as "philosophy itself"--"a discourse always addressed to another." Thus the philosopher himself provides the thread that runs through these essays on his writings, one guided by the importance of the fact of being addressed--the significance of the Saying much more than the Said. The authors, leading Levinas scholars and interpreters from across the globe, explore the philosopher's relationship to a wide range of intellectual traditions, including theology, philosophy of culture, Jewish thought, phenomenology, and the history of philosophy. They also engage Levinas's contribution to ethics, politics, law, justice, psychoanalysis and epistemology, among other themes. In their radical singularity, these essays reveal the inalienable alterity at the heart of Levinas's ethics. At the same time, each essay remains open to the others, and to the perspectives and positions they advocate. Thus the volume, in its quality and diversity, enacts an authentic encounter with Levinas's thought, embodying an intellectual ethics by virtue of its style. Bringing together contributions from philosophy, theology, literary theory, gender studies, and political theory, this book offers a deeper and more thorough encounter with Levinas's ethics than any yet written.

This paper challenges the standard view that Kant ignored the role of prudence in moral life by arguing that there are two notions of prudence at work in his moral and political thought. First, prudence is ordinarily understood as a technical imperative of skill that consists in reasoning about the means to achieve a particular conditional end. Second, prudence functions as a secondary form of practical thought that plays a significant role in the development of applied moral and political judgment. The political judgment of citizens and politicians is prudence regulatively guided by right and virtue. As informed by regulative ideas, prudential judgment negotiates the demands of these ideas in relation to the cultural, political, and social realities of a particular form of life. This sense of prudence is empirically informed and involves a context-sensitive application of morality as well as conceptions of individual and general welfare

Despite Heidegger’s critique of ethics, his use of ethically-inflected language intimates an interpretive ethics of encounter involving self-interpreting agents in their hermeneutical context and the formal indication of factical life as a situated dwelling open to possibilities enacted through practices of care, interpretation, and individuation. Existence is constituted practically in Dasein’s addressing, encountering, and responding to itself, others, and its world. Unlike rule-based or virtue ethics, this ethos of responsive encounter and individuating confrontation challenges any grounding in a determinate or exemplary model of reason, human nature, the virtues, or tradition.