ABSTRACT
In the theoretical tradition, the idea of vulnerability has not played a key role in moral or political philosophy until rather recently. Under the shadow of the complicated relationship between Levinas’s phenomenology and the Husserlian phenomenological tradition, Levinas’s phenomenological method is often marginalized in mainstream phenomenological discussions. Although he acknowledges that he does not follow the Husserlian method in a strict sense, he claims that his method “remains faithful to intentional analysis,” which aims to uncover “the locating of notions in the horizon of their appearing.” The notion of vulnerability is seen as a positive and important “heuristic tool” for socio-political analysis, rather than be in relegated to a marginalized individual status. From the above analysis it has been shown that discerning the different “faces” of vulnerability exposes varied dimensions of inter-human relations from which human vulnerability appears, which sheds light on the ambiguity of the conception.
