Lévinas: Chinese and Western Perspectives (Book Supplement Series to the Journal of Chinese Philosophy)

Leading Chinese and Western philosophers work alongside one another to explore the writings of one of the twentieth century s most perplexing and original ethical and metaphysical thinkers. For Chinese philosophers there are special reasons to pursue an interest in Lévinas, centering on his regard for ethics, rather than Husserlian epistemology or Heideggerian ontology, as first philosophy, a perspective that can be compared to the priority of a moral metaphysics for major figures in contemporary Neo–Confucianism. The thirteen outstanding contributors explain and assess other crucial features of Lévinas s philosophy with clarity, elegance and powerful insight.

CHUNG–YING CHENG / Preface.

NICHOLAS BUNNIN / Introduction.

YANG DACHUN / Lévinas and the Three Dimensions of Surpassing Phenomenology.

JACQUES TAMINIAUX / Lévinas and Heidegger: A Post–Heidegarrian Approach to Phenomenological Issues

DU XIAOZHEN / The Philosophy of Saintliness: Some Notes on the Thought of Lévinas.

MO WEIMIN / Phenomenology or Anti–Phenomenology? A Study of the Subject in Lévinas.

SIMON CRITCHLEY / The Split Subject.

WANG LIPING / Transcendence or Immanence? Lévinas, Bergson, and Chinese Thought.

WANG HENG / The Instant as the Key to the Escape from Being on Lévinas s Phenomenology of Sensibility and Time in His Early Period

MARIE–ANNE LESCOURRET / Desire by Lévinas.

SHANG JIE / The Phenomenology of Death.

WANG TANGJIA / The Concepts of Death in Heidegger and Lévinas

SUN XIANGCHEN / Emmanuel Lévinas and the Critique of Modern Political Philosophy.

ROBERT BERNASCONI / Extraterritoriality: Outside the Subject, Outside the State.

DORIAN WISZNIEWSKI / "The Space of Communicativity": Lévinas and Architecture.

Nicholas Bunnin is Director of the Philosophy Project, Institute for Chinese Studies, University of Oxford and Chairman of the British Committee of the Philosophy Summer School in China. He co–edited Contemporary Chinese Philosophy (Blackwell 2002) and has written on Chinese and comparative philosophy. He co–edited The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy (1997, 2 nd edition 2003) and co–authored The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy (2004).

Yang Dachun is Professor of Philosophy, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou. He co–edited A Century with Lévinas or the Destiny of the Other (2008) and wrote Language, Body and Other: Three Main Themes of Contemporary French Philosophy (forthcoming). Earlier books include studies of Kierkegaard, Derrida, Foucault, Merleau–Ponty, structuralism, post–structuralism and deconstruction, and he has translated major works of Merleau–Ponty into Chinese.

Linyu Gu is Managing Editor, Journal of Chinese Philosophy. She has written on Whitehead s process philosophy in relation to Chinese Philosophy and on Japanese philosophy.