About Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Levinas (born Emanuelis Levinas; French: [ɛmanɥɛl levinas]; 12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work within Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, focusing on the relationship of ethics to metaphysics and ontology. Levinas's first book-length essay, Totality and Infinity (1961), was written as his Doctorat d'État primary thesis (roughly equivalent to a Habilitation thesis). His work is based on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas's terms, on "ethics as first philosophy". Levinas's thesis "ethics as first philosophy", then, means that the traditional philosophical pursuit of knowledge is secondary to a basic ethical duty to the other. In 1929, he was awarded his doctorate (Doctorat d'université degree) by the University of Strasbourg for his thesis on the meaning of intuition in the philosophy of Husserl, published in 1930.
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