Emmanuel Levinas was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, of Jewish parents. His education familiarized him with the Hebrew Bible and the Russian novelists. After having studied at the gymnasiums in Kaunas and Charkow, Ukraine, he traveled to Strasbourg, where he studied philosophy from 1924 to 1929. He spent the academic year of 1928–1929 in Freiburg, where he attended the last seminars given by Edmund Husserl and the lectures and seminars of Martin Heidegger. His dissertation, La théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, was published in 1930. In 1930 Levinas settled in Paris, where he worked for the Alliance Israélite Universelle and its schools located throughout the Mediterranean. In 1947 he became the director of the École Normale Israélite Orientale, the training facility for teachers of those schools. In 1961 he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Poitiers and in 1967 at the University...