•  53
    The drama of being: Levinas and the history of philosophy
    Continental Philosophy Review 40 (3): 251-273. 2006.
    The motif of the ‘drama of being’ is a dominant thread that spans the entirety of Levinas's six decades of authorship. As we will see, from the start of his writing career, Levinas consciously frames the tension between ontology and ethics in a dramatic form. A careful exposition of this motif and other related theatrical metaphors in his work–-such as ‘intrigue,’ ‘plot,’ and ‘scene’–-can offer us not only a better appreciation of the evolution of Levinas's thought, but also of his proper place …Read more
  •  52
    While much has been written about Levinas's conception of ethics, very little has been said about the connection between ethics and holiness in his work. Yet, throughout much of his corpus, Levinas consistently links the two. The first part of my article addresses the important distinction that Levinas establishes between the sacred (le sacré) and holiness (la sainteté). According to Levinas, several influential thinkers conflate these two categories. Holiness, Levinas suggests, represents a kin…Read more
  •  31
    Introduction: Varieties of Continental Philosophy and Religion
    Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale 20 (1): 1-10. 2016.
  •  27
    Lévinas’s Critique of the Sacred
    International Philosophical Quarterly 42 (4): 519-534. 2002.
    Lévinas’s harsh criticisms of the sacred have irked not just his critics but even some who sympathize with his work. Taken at face value, some of Lévinas’s comments concerning the sacred appear prejudicial towards non-monotheistic religions. But a closer reading of his analysis of the sacred shows that his preoccupation with the sacred has to do with a questionable “temptation” or disposition found in every human being. Drawing on the insights of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Lévy-Bruhl, Lévinas s…Read more
  •  25
    Introduction
    Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale 20 (1): 1-10. 2016.
  •  23
    Ethics and Selfhood (review)
    Symposium 8 (3): 706-709. 2004.
  •  19
    Lévinas’s Critique of the Sacred
    International Philosophical Quarterly 42 (4): 519-534. 2002.
    Lévinas’s harsh criticisms of the sacred have irked not just his critics but even some who sympathize with his work. Taken at face value, some of Lévinas’s comments concerning the sacred appear prejudicial towards non-monotheistic religions. But a closer reading of his analysis of the sacred shows that his preoccupation with the sacred has to do with a questionable “temptation” or disposition found in every human being. Drawing on the insights of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Lévy-Bruhl, Lévinas s…Read more
  •  17
    The cinema of the Dardenne brothers represents a new kind of cinema, one that challenges a number of our conventional ways of thinking about the distinction between religion and secularism, belief and unbelief. Their films explore the intricacies of spiritual and ethical transformations as they are experienced within embodied, material life. These features of their cinema will be examined primarily through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of the imbrication of the drama of existence and…Read more
  •  1
    Levinas argues that tragic descriptions---from the Greeks to Nietzsche and Heidegger---rarely dare to draw the full implications of asserting that being is tragic. At the same time that it accurately attests to the irremediable character of being, the tragic position proposes a remedy that presupposes the self's capacity for transformation and meaningfulness. Heidegger, for example, holds that Dasein possesses as its highest possibility the capacity to embrace its finitude. For Levinas, however,…Read more