Author: Emmanuel Levinas

Levinas put ethics before metaphysics: the encounter with another person's face makes a claim on you that you never agreed to and cannot refuse, and philosophy since the Greeks had the order wrong by beginning with being. Totality and Infinity is that argument at length. Lithuanian-born, he studied under Husserl and Heidegger at Freiburg, then spent the war in a German prison camp as a captured French officer while his wife and daughter were hidden in a convent; his family in Lithuania was killed. He never forgave Heidegger and said so in print. He taught in Paris, ran a Jewish teachers' college, and gave a Talmud lecture every year for decades.