Whereas traditionally first philosophy denoted either metaphysics or theology, only to be reconceived by Heidegger as fundamental ontology, Levinas argued that it is ethics that should be so conceived.
But rather than formulating an ethical theory , Levinas developed his philosophy in opposition to both these aforementioned approaches.
It takes the form of a description and interpretation of the event of encountering another person. However that may be, his work is in ongoing, critical dialogue with three philosophers: Husserl, Heidegger, and Hegel. He is also indebted to Heidegger for his hermeneutics of being-in-the-world. In this entry, attention is focused throughout to the contribution of commentators, with a view to providing a gateway to recent secondary literature.
In the s, Levinas continued to publish studies of the thought of his two principal teachers, Husserl and Heidegger. As we shall see, he will reconceive transcendence as a need for escape from existence, and work out a different analysis of lived time in that project. In the two imbricated dimensions of human life, sentient-affective and intentional, our experience of being comes to pass, in the relationship between body and egoic consciousness.
This quite materialist approach to transcendence is nevertheless motivated by the question of our mortality and finite being, but unlike Heidegger, it also examines the enigma called infinity. It flees its uncanny thrownness by distracting itself in social pursuits, a position that Levinas will not adopt.
