Levinas Philosophy Summer Seminar Series

2017 Levinas attendees at Niagara Falls.

The 2017 seminar, held at the University at Buffalo, included a trip to Niagara Falls

The Levinas Philosophy Summer Seminar series examines a variety of topics approached through the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95), who is recognized as one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th Century. 

Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers

“Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics of Democracy” - Summer 2022 - University at Buffalo

(SUNY), funded in 2020 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

One week intensive text-based examination of politics and democracy viewed from the ethics of responsibility elaborated in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995). Opposing the Hobbesian ‘realpolitik’ of human-wolves, on the one hand, and the liberalism of Lockean propertied freedoms, on the other, Levinas roots the political in the radical imperative inter-personal obligations of ethical responsibility – for each other and for all others – which is to say, in the quest for social justice. Such a perspective binding the political to the ethical, to justice, makes democracy not one regime among others but the best regime, the ideal of politics.

Questions and communications: levinas.center@gmail.com  

About the Seminars

Contact

Jolanta Saldukaityte
Vilnius, Lithuania
levinas.center@gmail.com