Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) was a major philosopher of the 20th century who attempted to proceed philosophically beyond phenomenology and ontology and to engage in a more immediate and irreducible consideration of the nature and meaning of other persons. A strongly religious person, Levinas also wrote extensively on Jewish themes.

Emmanuel Levinas was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, in January 1906, into a traditional Jewish family. He did his elementary and secondary studies in Jewish and secular subjects first in Lithuania and then, later, in Russia. At the age of 18 he went west to study at the University of Strasbourg, where he majored in philosophy both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In 1928 he moved to the University of Freiburg to study with the great philosopher Edmund Husserl, the father of the so-called phenomenological school in modern philosophy. In Freiburg he also encountered, for the first time, Martin Heidegger and was...