ABSTRACT
Chapter 2, Philosophy, Psychology, and the Knot of Science, examines the relation between philosophy and psychology, particularly for the rupture, the faultline, of their difference. It is by psychology’s claim as a science that a divorce was wrought from philosophy. It transpires, however, that one can conceive of science in different ways and that there is, in fact, two broad approaches to thinking and practicing a scientific psychology. The chapter explores the assumptions and historical trajectories of psychology as a natural science as opposed to psychology as a human science. Additionally, some attention is paid to phenomenology, which is central to both psychology as a human science and Levinas’s philosophical project. It transpires that a welcoming receptivity to Levinas issues most readily from psychology conceived as a human science, and the chapter continues to review existing attempts to “bring Levinas to psychology.” It characterizes and organizes such attempts thematically and also highlights and prefigures some of the difficulties of the philosophical translation to psychology, some of which is voiced by Levinas himself.
