Emmanuel Levinas was a Lithuanian Jew who lived from 1906 to
1995, and studied under some of the most influential thinkers in
Europe. He later moved to France and authored one of the most
exciting and original philosophies of the 20th Century. He lived
for a time as a prisoner of war during World War 2. After the
war he responded with force against what he saw as the movement
of western philosophy. In Contrast with Western Philosophy What
is Western philosophy? Western philosophy traces its ancestry to
ancient Europe, to countries such as Greece and Rome. It is the
philosophy that you and I are already familiar with. It
permeates our thoughts, ideas, and even how we make sense of the
world. In Western philosophy, truth is generally considered to
be the unchanging, foundational principles of the Universe.
Philosophy itself is thought to be the method of reducing the
flux of everyday experience to a set of static principles. For
Western philosophy, there is no loss in this “reduction,”
because we are making the