ABSTRACT
Edmund Husserl's own phenomenology, no less than Rene Descartes's philosophy which had inspired it, was a central target of Martin Heidegger's destruction of the history of philosophy. Though mention of "alterity," "transcendence," and "ethics" has become so widespread in continental philosophy that such themes are almost cliches, they nevertheless frequently are misunderstood. In working toward an understanding of "ethics as first philosophy," it will do to examine Husserl and Heidegger, since their own accounts of intersubjectivity will represent seminal foils to Emmanuel Levinas's own. As Levinas himself observes, the wound it leaves initiates a threefold revolution in our experience: first, from ontology to ethics; second, from "totality" to "Infinity;" and finally, from freedom to justice. Any analysis of Levinas that neglects the issue of the "trace of God" would be incomplete. Levinas's own relationship to the question of God is indisputably complicated and sometimes rather ambivalent.
