AUTONOMY OR HETERONOMY? LEVINAS'S CHALLENGE TO MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM

The Ethical Phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas: Drawing on Phenomenology to Explore the Central Features of Family Life

“…These themes have contributed significantly to the work of theorists such as Jacques Derrida (Plant, ), Jean‐Luc Marion (), Zygmunt Bauman (, , ), and others. His work seems to just be gaining further attention and significance as it finds its influence in numerous fields, such as law (Manderson, ), communications and technology (Miller, ; Pinchevski, ), health (Clifton‐Soderstrom, ; Lindh, Severinsson, & Berg, ), psychology (Gantt & Williams, ; Goodman, ; Kunz, ; Williams & Gantt, ), sociology (Raffel, ; Smart, , ), therapy (Larner, ), education (Child, Williams, Birch, & Boody, ; Standish, ), and feminism (Chanter, ; Perpich, ).…”

Levinas and Environmental Education

“…To engage Levinas is to undertake the pursuit. Thus, the inability to provision an eco-ethics or the eco-ethico-politics is not an example of the negative response that Child et al (1995) and others note that many educators confront when they turn to postmodernist/poststructuralist theories. Levinas positively signals what ought to be pursued.…”

“…Whilst the number of engagements with Levinas in education is limited to date, two distinct foci can be discerned: the conduct of educational research (Child et al, 1995;Dykeman, 1993) and the dynamics of teacher-student relationships (Abunuwara, 1998;Edgoose, 1997;Todd, 2001). In both of these lines of inquiry, Levinas' thought is being linked to interpersonal practices in education.…”

A Pedagogy of Unknowing: Witnessing Unknowability in Teaching and Learning

“…In particular, Levinas's critique does not deny the reality of rules, laws, institutions, policies, and so on; what he is arguing is that the ontology of all these does not exhaust their meaning, because ontology does not respond to the face of the Other (Child et al, 1995). The problem with via negativa on this issue is that it can only think of the individual as a particular instance of something more general; this is precisely why it always remains within ontology.…”

“…Freedom is not ethically questioned and therefore one has no understanding of ethics other than in terms of ontological possibilities and limitations. Levinas makes clear that ethical responsibility to the Other is not a matter of free will, because one has infinite responsibility to the Other (Child et al, 1995). The impossibility of knowing the Other is precisely the condition of ethics; the encounter which occurs between self and Other gives birth to an infinite ethical responsibility (Levinas, 1985).…”