 Levinas published his thesis, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, in 1930. It was the first book-length introduction to Husserl’s thought in French. By focusing on the theme of intuition, Levinas established what philosophical readers find notably in Husserl’s Ideas I and II (published in 1913 and, for Ideas II, partially in 1930): every human experience is open to phenomenological description; every human experience carries meaning from the outset, and can be examined as a mode of intentionality (Ideas II: §56 h and §§57–61). The following year, he published his co-translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, in which Husserl had laid out a systematic presentation of transcendental phenomenology. In the 1930s, Levinas continued to publish studies of the thought of his two principal teachers, Husserl and Heidegger. These included the essays “Martin Heidegger and Ontology” (EDE: 53–76) and the extensive “The Work of Edmund Husserl” (DEH: 47–89). In the 1930s and 1940s, his philosophical project was influenced by Husserl’s phenomenological method, whose foundation arguably lay in the centrality of the “transcendental ego” (Ideas I: §49). However, suspicious of the intellectualism of Husserl’s approach to essences (phenomenological “eidetics”), Levinas gravitated toward Heidegger’s more worldly approach to existence in Being and  Time.[3]  Between 1930 and 1935, he will nevertheless turn away from Heidegger’s approach to being and transcendence and develop the outlines of a new ontology. As we shall see, he will reconceive transcendence as a need for escape from existence, and work out a different analysis of lived time in that project.