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13NDPR Book Review (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Review. 2017.Gabriela Basterra, The Subject of Freedom: Kant, Levinas, Fordham University Press, 2015, 197pp., $29.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780823265152. Reviewed by Kevin Houser, Case Western Reserve University "What is a subject?" "In what sense is it free?" If we ask Kant and Levinas these questions we expect incompatible answers -- an expectation encouraged by Levinas, who often deploys Kant as a foil for his own views about reason, morality, and freedom. The flash points are by now familiar. Kant supposes morali…Read more
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64Levinas and the Second Personal Structure of Free WillIn Michael Fagenblat & Melis Erdur (eds.), Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: Second-Personal Normativity and the Moral Life. Research in Phenomenology Series.. forthcoming.Many suppose some form of free will is required to make moral responsibility possible. Levinas thinks this is backwards. Freedom does not make moral responsibility possible. Moral responsibility makes freedom possible. Free will is not a condition for morality. Free will is an aspect and expression of our moral condition. Key to Levinas’s argument is his rejection of free-will-individualism: the idea that free will is a power a single being could possess. A “contradiction” extracted from stand…Read more
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484"Esau I Hated: Levinas on the Ethics of God's AbsenceListening: Journal of Communication Ethics, Religion, and Culture 2 (50). 2016.Emmanuel Levinas objects to traditional theodicy. But his objection to theodicy is so untraditional that God’s existence is incidental to it. The primary problem with theodicy, he argues, is not evidential but ethical. The primary problem with theodicy is not that its claims are false, but that its claims are offensive. In laying out Levinas's unusual view, I first sketch out the specifically ethical nature of theodicy’s offense: failing to acknowledge suffering. Next I discuss Levinas unusual a…Read more
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1Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: an Ethical Metaphysics of ReasonsIn Michael L. Morgan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Levinas, Oxford University Press. pp. 587-614. 2018.Recent analytic philosophy often explains our responsibility to one another in terms of normative reasons. Emmanuel Levinas thinks this is backwards. We are not responsible to one another because we have reasons to be. For reasons are themselves something we are responsible to one another to have; and it is only because we are responsible to one another for them that we are able to have our own reasons. Put broadly: Reasons-responsiveness is a form of responsiveness to persons. Standard reasons-…Read more
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18Facing the Space of ReasonsLevinas Studies 11 (1): 121-148. 2016.Analytic philosophers often appeal to Reason and reasons to explain ethical relations. By Levinasian lights, this is backwards. It is not because we are already open to Reason that we are ethically open to others. It is through “the welcoming of [others] that the will opens to Reason.” We do not respond to others’ needs because we are reasonable; being reasonable is itself “a response to . . . a face, [who already] speaks.” The structure of reason, theoretical or practical, does not produce ethi…Read more
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17Facing the Space of ReasonsLevinas Studies 11 (1): 121-148. 2016.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Facing the Space of ReasonsKevin Houser (bio)The Face and ExplanationAnalytic philosophers often appeal to reason and reasons to explain ethics. By Levinasian lights, this is backward. It is not because we are already open to reason that we are ethically open to others. It is through “the welcoming of [others] that the will opens to reason.” We do not respond to others’ needs because we are reasonable; being reasonable is itself “a r…Read more
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California Polytechnic State University, San Luis ObispoDepartment of PhilosophyNon tenure-track faculty
San Luis Obispo County, California, United States of America