Emmanuel Levinas’s life spans the twentieth century and intersects with a number of major events and movements during his lifetime. He was born in 1906 in Kovno, Lithuania, and died in Paris in 1995.

There are four features of Levinas’s life and thought that will help us appreciate his significance and make this study relevant: 1) his historical situation, including the years leading up to WW II, especially the role of the Holocaust in his memory and in his thought; 2) his relationship to Judaism and religious texts; and 3) his place among those who were critical of Western philosophy and yet found special links to that tradition; and 4) his role in the twentieth-century debates about the place of ethics in our lives.

Reading Levinas requires patience and a sense about when to relish ambiguities and nuances and when to demand rigor and precision. We will read him carefully to follow his lines of reason and imaginatively enough to try and make them relevant to our own lives.