Robert Gibbs radically revises standard interpretations of the two key figures of modern Jewish philosophy: Franz Rosenzweig, author of the "Star of Redemption", and Emmanuel Levinas, a major voice in contemporary intellectual life, who has inspired such thinkers as Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray, and Blachot. Rosenzweig and Levinas thought in relation to different philosophical schools and wrote in disparate styles. Their personal relations to Judaism and to Christianity were markedly dissimilar. Finally, they were divided by history: Rosenzweig's premature death occurred before the advent of Nazism, and Levinas's life has been "dominated by the presentiment and memory of the Nazi horror". To Gibbs however, the two thinkers possess basic affinities with each other. Correlating traditional Jewish themes in social ethics with postmodern philosophy, Rosenzweig and Levinas not only discover new resonances in Jewish thought but also reorient philosophy itself, so that it takes its bearing from the individual's unavoidable responsibility for others.
Levinas, who was the first expositor in France of Husserl, Heidegger, and the phenomenological method, has been read as a philosopher, with little concern for his Jewish thought, and Rosenzweig has been seen exclusively as an existentialist theologian. Gibbs maintains, on the other hand, that Rosenzweig strives to elucidate universally accessible concepts and social practices and that Levinas is a Jewish thinker in exactly the same sense. Through this argument, the book offers important insights into how philosophy is continually being altered by its encounter with other traditions.
- ISBN10 0691029644
- ISBN13 9780691029641
- Publish Date 23 October 1994 (first published 20 December 1992)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 17 June 2003
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Princeton University Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 293
- Language English
- URL https://press.princeton.edu/titles/5149.html