The significance of Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of responsibility for medical judgment

Emmanuel Levinas was born in Kovno, Lithuania in 1906, to Jewish parents. In 1923, he went to Strasbourg (the closest French city to Lithuania) in order to study philosophy under such teachers as Charles Blondel and Maurice Pradines. In 1928—29, he attended a series of lectures given in Freiburg by Husserl on phenomenological psychology and the constitution of intersubjectivity. It was at this time that he began to write his dissertation on Husserl’s theory of intuition. He also discovered Heidegger’s Being and Time. His book De l’existence à l’existant, published in 1947 described his anonymous existence, and the bouts of insomnia, sleep, horror, vertigo, appetite, fatigue and indolence - that he had endured in captivity. This book attracted little attention, although Jean Wahl invited him in the same year to give a course for his students, the text of wich was published soon after under the title Le temps et l’autre. This situation changed in 1961, however, when Levinas published Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité. Suddenly a master was revealed, one not only capable of renewing twentieth century phenomenology but one who also combined a radical critique of Western philosophy.

His second major book Autrement qu’êtreou au-delà de l’essence, which appeared in 1974, represents a new stage in his thinking, one even more original than the former. The philosophical work of Levinas became known in America through the early translation of his main texts, Totality and Infinity:An Essay on Exteriority in 1969 and Otherwise than Beingor Beyond Essence in 1981.