Emmanuel Levinas, in an attempt to overcome a certain naivety within his exploration of ethics as given in what he describes as the face-to-face encounter, attempts to introduce language into what had only been a "picture" of such an encounter. He distinguishes between The saying of something and what it is that is said during the talk, The said.
Emmanuel Levinas was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work related to Jewish philosophy, existentialism, ethics, phenomenology and ontology.
The face-to-face relation is a concept in the French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas' thought on human sociality. It means that, ethically, people are responsible to one-another in the face-to-face encounter. Specifically, Lévinas says that the human face "orders and ordains" us. It calls the subject into “giving and serving” the Other.
The Saying relates to an irreducible exposure to the other. The saying makes the self-exposure of sincerity possible, a way of giving everything, of not holding secrets, of complete generosity. One is corrupted into, learns or decides, to lie, to simulate, to dissimulate, to ignore and remain politically or economically silent.
The said, on the other hand, refers to the intelligibility and reference of what is communicated or transferred, it can be subjected to the closure truth as total presence, it is associated with ontology (i.e., philosophy and science).
The concept of the metaphysics of presence is an important consideration in deconstruction. Deconstructive interpretation holds that the entire history of Western philosophy with its language and traditions has emphasized the desire for immediate access to meaning, and thus built a metaphysics or ontotheology based on privileging presence over absence.
Ontology is the philosophical study of being. More broadly, it studies concepts that directly relate to being, in particular becoming, existence, reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology often deals with questions concerning what entities exist or may be said to exist and how such entities may be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.
The complication Levinas introduces into his analysis of the face-to-face gives his ethics a further reach toward the kind of universalist ethics of a humanism:
Humanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence over acceptance of dogma or superstition. The meaning of the term humanism has fluctuated according to the successive intellectual movements which have identified with it. The term was coined by theologian Friedrich Niethammer at the beginning of the 19th century to refer to a system of education based on the study of classical literature. Generally, however, humanism refers to a perspective that affirms some notion of human freedom and progress. It views humans as solely responsible for the promotion and development of individuals and emphasizes a concern for man in relation to the world.
Phenomenology is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany. It then spread to France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work.
Pluralism is a term used in philosophy, meaning "doctrine of multiplicity", often used in opposition to monism and dualism. The term has different meanings in metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and logic.
Semiosis is any form of activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning. Briefly – semiosis is sign process. The term was introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) to describe a process that interprets signs as referring to their objects, as described in his theory of sign relations, or semiotics. Other theories of sign processes are sometimes carried out under the heading of semiology, following on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913).
Knud Ejler Løgstrup was a Danish philosopher and theologian. His work, which combines elements of phenomenology, ethics and theology, has exerted considerable influence in postwar Nordic thought. More recently, his work has been discussed by prominent figures in anglophone philosophy and sociology such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Stern, Simon Critchley and Zygmunt Bauman.
Différance is a French term coined by Jacques Derrida. It is a central concept in Derrida's deconstruction, a critical outlook concerned with the relationship between text and meaning. The term différance means "difference and deferral of meaning."
In phenomenology, the terms the Other and the Constitutive Other identify the other human being, in his and her differences from the Self, as being a cumulative, constituting factor in the self-image of a person; as acknowledgement of being real; hence, the Other is dissimilar to and the opposite of the Self, of Us, and of the Same. The Constitutive Other is the relation between the personality and the person (body) of a human being; the relation of essential and superficial characteristics of personal identity that corresponds to the relationship between opposite, but correlative, characteristics of the Self, because the difference is inner-difference, within the Self.
In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Proposition 6.5 seeks to ground his philosophy of action.
Difference is a key concept of philosophy, denoting the process or set of properties by which one entity is distinguished from another within a relational field or a given conceptual system. In the Western philosophical system, difference is traditionally viewed as being opposed to identity, following the Principles of Leibniz, and in particular, his Law of the identity of indiscernibles. In structuralist and poststructuralist accounts, however, difference is understood to be constitutive of both meaning and identity. In other words, because identity is viewed in non-essentialist terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of differences, it is the case that for both structuralism and poststructuralism, identity cannot be said to exist without difference.
French philosophy, here taken to mean philosophy in the French language, has been extremely diverse and has influenced Western philosophy as a whole for centuries, from the medieval scholasticism of Peter Abelard, through the founding of modern philosophy by René Descartes, to 20th century philosophy of science, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, and postmodernism.
Martin Heidegger, the 20th-century German philosopher, produced a large body of work that intended a profound change of direction for philosophy. Such was the depth of change that he found it necessary to introduce a large number of neologisms, often connected to idiomatic words and phrases in the German language.
Meontology is the philosophical study of non-being.
Ecstasy is a term used in Ancient Greek, Christian and Existential philosophy. The different traditions using the concept have radically different perspectives.
Robert L. Bernasconi is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is well known as a reader of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, and for his work on the concept of race. He has also written on the history of philosophy.
Trace is one of the most important concepts in Derridian deconstruction. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida used this word in two of his early books, namely Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology.
La Quarantaine is a novel written in French by French Nobel laureate writer J. M. G. Le Clézio.
Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority is a 1961 work of philosophy by Emmanuel Levinas. It is one of his early works, highly influenced by phenomenology.
Feminist Jewish ethics is an area of study in Jewish ethics and feminist philosophy.