Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1996), who was born in Lithuania of Jewish parents, studied the Hebrew Bible along with the works of the Russian authors Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), and Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910). In 1928 and 1929 he attended the philosopher Edmund Husserl's (1859–1938) lectures in Freiburg, Germany, and started writing a dissertation on Husserl's theory of intuition. He also attended lectures given by the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Levinas was largely responsible for introducing Husserl and Heidegger to French philosophers, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980).

Emmanuel Levinas, 1906–1995. Levinas 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. (© Bassouls Sophie/Corbis Sygma.)

Levinas's first major work, Totality and Infinity, was published in 1961. It was only in the 1980s that a wider audience acknowledged Levinas's work, and his thought eventually...