ABSTRACT
As used in the title of this book the word ‘genealogy’ is intended in more than one sense. At least one of these senses will be operative in each chapter. It is employed most determinately of the stage of Levinas’s teaching for the exposition of which he invokes the nomenclature of the family tree. More generally, it refers to what with reservation may be called the logical order in which that and the other phases of his teaching are generated. Still more generally, it refers to the order in which his thinking develops historically from one publication to another. Most generally, it refers to the way his philosophy, including his philosophy of philosophy, is related to the history of philosophical thinking-not least Nietzsche’s thinking of the genealogy of morals-and to the very idea of generality that has dominated that history.
