This dissertation is concerned with what it means to live well towards others. It develops a form of everyday ethics that emphasises how existing in the world and being ethical are entwined. To develop this approach to ethics this study employs Alfred Schutz’s phenomenological descriptions of everyday world and Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of the ethical. The purpose of the thesis is to develop an understanding of ethics that operates at the everyday level of human-to-human contact. This form of ethics is significant in that it indicates that being ethical is an important aspect of human life. My intention is to show that ethics is always more than simply the institution of codes of conduct that govern the way people act. The significance of the thesis is that it contributes both to ways in which ethics can be understood and to the manner in which ethics can be operationalised at an institutional level. My thesis has four specific aims. First, to examine the conditions and characteristics that constitute the everyday world as understood in Alfred Schutz’s work. Second, to explore Emmanuel Levinas’s understanding of the ethical. My third aim is to synthesise these theorists’ ideas through my heuristic device, Echoes of the Other. This device will allow me to extract the conditions for and features of an everyday ethics. My fourth aim is to point to an in situ illustration of this approach to ethics. This will be drawn from my observations at the Western Australian Police Academy. My argument is that synthesising Levinas’s and Schutz’s ideas will enable the development of an everyday ethics. This will highlight the ways in which ethics functions at the micro levels of human life. This study contributes to approaches to ethics, and specifically, ethics derived from Levinas’s ethical relation. This approach can be of use to people interested in ethics, phenomenology, the works of Levinas and Schutz and those concerned with developing ways to live well towards others.

Texte remanié de: Th. doct.--Philos.--Paris 8, 1998. Titre de soutenance : La défaillance du sujet, le féminin différence sexuelle et immémoriale dans les écrits d'Emmanuel Lévinas. / Bibliogr. p. 241-251. Index.

Texte remanié de: Th. doct.--Philo.--Université catholique de Louvain, 1996. / Bibliogr. p. 379-390.

Levinas has come to be seen as one of the principle representatives in contemporary thought of a certain philosophically articulated concept of 'messianism'. On the one hand, the appeal by philosophy to messianism is conceived by many as a 'turn' within postmodern thought broadly conceived towards a theology and ethics. On the other hand, there is the closely related consensus that Levinas‘ messianism is an expression of a certain 'correlation' between 'philosophy' and 'Judaism', a correlation in which Judaism becomes the suppressed voice of conscience of the latter. We revisit some of the consensuses upon which these related understandings are based. Firstly, we consider whether the heterogeneity of Levinas‘ different articulations of the messianic dimension should be emphasized, a heterogeneity which defies simple classification. Secondly, we consider whether Levinas‘ thought can properly be called messianic as such: we emphasize the functional character of messianism in Levinas, and how messianism is structurally re-ordered according to the function it takes on. We explore namely the manner in which messianic discourse in Levinas is implicated in the construction of a certain humanism, and how it is called upon to negotiate the obstacles which such a construction faces. Re-ordered according to this regime, we consider whether what unites the various expressions of messianism in Levinas is not the articulation of a discourse which progressively realizes its non-eschatological status. We frame this thesis in terms of what we call the 'parody' of messianism, a notion we derive from Nietzsche. This complicates any notion of a 'turn' within postmodernism; and yet it can be shown to be an intensification of a certain tendency at work already within normative Judaism.

Il faut avec Levinas faire le constat d’un premier problème, premier parce qu’il y va du sens de la vie en commun et du respect de l’humain. Annonçons ce problème : « si la proximité ne m’ordonnait qu’autrui tout seul, il n’y aurait pas eu de problème ». Nous ne sommes pas deux au monde et notre rapport à l’autre, au tiers, au prochain comme au lointain, s’impose toujours déjà à nous, avant tout consentement. « Problème », car l’autre est aussi le plus préoccupant par excellence, imprévisible, nous nous trouverons toujours déjà en relation avec lui dans une infinité de rapports indéfectibles. Jetés que nous sommes dans le monde, notre préoccupation de et pour l’autre nous est imposée en héritage avec la même nécessité que notre présence à nous même. Dans notre existence, nous n’avons été et ne serons jamais vraiment seuls, c’est pourquoi notre rapport à l’autre, depuis les rapports de paix jusqu’à la guerre devient un problème fondamental, le premier comme le dernier des problèmes. Nous montrerons dans ce travail que le problème de la guerre et de la paix prend naissance par et pour l’être mais nous irons plus loin en identifiant précisément qu’à l’être et à l’ontologie s’ajoute une autre source de conflit, d’autant plus ambivalente qu’elle sera tout aussi nécessaire aux paix qu’aux guerres : la transcendance. Ce que nous proposerons de faire voir ici et de soutenir, c’est que l’être n’est pas la seule origine du mal et conséquemment de la guerre. La position de Levinas aura sur ce point peu à peu évolué depuis ses écrits de jeunesse et l’expérience des camps jusqu’à ses œuvres de la maturité discréditant la jouissance et le bonheur pour soi. C’est à ce déplacement que nous inviterons le lecteur ainsi qu’à la compréhension des implications touchant à la justice, à l’Etat, au bonheur et à la réalisation effective de la paix comme au surgissement toujours possible et menaçant de la guerre.Ce travail ne fera pas l’économie de la lucidité réclamée par Levinas sur le siècle passé et ses génocides et cherchera à concilier cette dernière avec l’espoir que l’ensemble de sa philosophie veut soutenir. / Along a first, major question, primordial as it involves living together and respecting human values. Let us present that problem: «it proximity concerned one person only there would not have been any difficulty». There are not only two of us in this world, and our relation to the other, the third one, the closest as well as the furtherest, is a reality we cannot deny before any consent. «A problem» because the other is equally, par excellence, the most worry some, and unpredictable with the other we shall always be in a relation that includes an infinity of indestructible links. Last as we are in the world our preoccupation “of” and “for” the other is imposed on us as an heritage with the same necessity as our presence to ourselves. In our existence we have never been and never shall be alone; that is why our relation to the other, from peace to war, becomes an essential question, the first as well as the last of the problems. We will show in these links that the problem of war and peace arises by and for the being, we shall to go further by identifying precisely that to being and to ontology is added another source of conflict, which is all the more ambivalent as it will be necessary to peace and war: transcendence. What we would like to let appear and to sustain is that the being is not the only origin of evil and consequently of war. Levinas’s position on that point has slowly but significantly evolved, as the thesis expressed in his early writing has been submitted to the harsh experience of the nazi concentration camps and have finally resulted in his maturity in a general discard for enjoyment and happiness for ourself. This is the voyage to which the reader is invited, as well as to approach of the implications it includes for justice, state, happiness and the effective realization of peace as well as for the always possible and sudden looming up treat of war.We shall accompagny Levinas in his striving for lucidity regarding the last century and its genocides and we shall endeavor to reconcile that lucidity with the hope his whole philosophy wants never theless to sustain.

vii, 50 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / Emmanuel Levinas has recently been given much attention for the resources that his writing could provide for an ethics of the non-human. While some commentators dismiss the humanistic biases of Levinas' analyses in favor of expanded sites of application, others argue that Levinas' anthropocentrism is central to his philosophy. This debate is resolved by demonstrating that Levinas' analysis oflanguage and separation in Totality and Infinity is an analysis of the hW11an on!.v. For Levinas, ethics signifies the peculiar way ofbeing in the world that is found in the site of the human. This way of being in the world is the emergence of concems about justice, the emergence of reason and discourse, but it does not restrict moral consideration to hwnans. Despite Levinas' own tendency to align the non-human animal against the ethical, there is nothing in Levinas' analysis that prevents granting full moral consideration to the non-human. / Adviser: Ted Toadvine

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<p>This dissertation argues that Emmanuel Levinas' s is first and foremost a philosopher of subjectivity. I argue that the themes of restlessness of singularity and restlessness govern Levinas' s account of subjectivity and that these themes directly inform the account of the relationship with the Other found in his mature works. Chapter I presents Levinas' s early reflections on identity and escape as arising from his encounter with Husserl's and Heidegger's respective philosophies. The first chapter establishes restlessness and singularity as central themes in Levinas's philosophy. The second chapter argues that Levinas' s account of the relationship with existence found in From Existence to Existence further develops these themes by establishing the subject as originating from a pre-cognitive event that Levinas calls "hypostasis." Chapter III turns to Totality and Infinity and argues that the notion of the "anterior posterior" condition, by which Levinas means a "logical" condition that precedes a "chronological one," is conceptually similar to the idea of "hypostasis" found in the earlier works and that it allows him to develop the theme of singularity as an ethical category. Chapter IV focuses solely on the connection between singularity and the Face, and argues that Levinas's notion of the Face follows from his earlier accounts of singularity but that Levinas fails to address the precise relationship between the different forms of meaning that make up interior life and the relationship with transcendence, and that these problems lead to further questions concerning the roles of politics and justice in his later philosophy. The final chapter will show that in his later works Levinas rehabilitates the theme of restlessness, which is absent in Totality and Infinity, and that it allows him to show that the singularity of the self anci the singularity of the Other are both bound in the same moment. Thus, Levinas returns to the theme of restlessness as a way of addressing the problems that I find in Totality and Infinity. These later developments lead to further questions concerning the role of context in Levinas's idea of the "political." The last chapter concludes by arguing that Levinas is unable to address everyday moral decisionmaking because of his account of the ethical as a "meaning without context."</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis contributes to the discussion of two questions central to the scholarly study of the work of Emmanuel Levinas: the question of the nature of his hermeneutics, and the question of the nature of the relationship between his philosophy and his religion. The thesis consists of an extended examination of how and why Levinas reads certain of the sources of Judaism. I watch him utilizing images, ideas and quotations from the Bible, Kabbalah and Talmud in support of his larger philosophical project, a project which consists mainly of a polemic against modem ontology --philosophical and political --and against the hermeneutic of reification which supports that ontology. The Bible, Kabbalah and Talmud become, in Levinas' reading, weapons in a battle against Hegelianism, Nazi totalitarianism, and modem progressivist liberalism; or, more precisely, they come to represent ways of turning away from the battles these structures inscribe towards a prophetic peace. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Texte remanié de: Th. doct.--Philosophie, 2002. / Notes bibliogr., bibliogr. p. 177-183.