ABSTRACT
Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was born in Kovno, Lithuania, where his parents were part of a distinguished Jewish community. In 1923 he moved to Strasbourg, where he studied philosophy. From 1928 to 1929 he studied phenomenology with Edmund Husserl in Freiburg. It was there that he met Martin HEIDEGGER, one of the primary figures in Levinas’s thought. Levinas’s doctoral thesis was entitled The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (1930). Before World War II, Levinas moved to Paris and began teaching at the École Normale Israélite Orientale. In 1935, he published “On Escape” (1935) in Recherches philosophiques, an essay that evinces his desire to move beyond a discussion of phenomenological being. During the war, Levinas volunteered for the French military, serving as a translator of German and Russian. He was captured by the Nazis and spent the remainder of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp. Many members of his family, including his parents, were murdered by the Nazis. Fortunately, however, his wife and daughter survived in France. Levinas has described his life as dominated by the memory of exile and the Holocaust. After the war, he was reunited with his wife and daughter in Paris, where
he participated in Talmudic studies with the famous Monsieur Chouchani (who was then also teaching the young Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, another Lithuanian). Levinas became director of the Alliance Israélite universelle, but did not begin his university career until the publication of his first major work, Totality and Infinity, in 1961. He was appointed professor of philosophy at Poitiers, before moving on to the University of Paris-Nanterre in 1967, and finally to the Sorbonne, from where he retired in 1976.
