This essay takes up the critical importance of Levinas’s work for mental health care and explores... more This essay takes up the critical importance of Levinas’s work for mental health care and explores the timeliness and relevance of Levinas’s concerns in relationship to the contemporary shape of the clinical disciplines. The authors provide a critical assessment of the existing literature on Levinas and psychology by chronicling and examining the realms of clinical scholarship and theory to which Levinas’s work has been applied. After arguing for the substantial value of this intersectional literature and addressing the current impediments involved in applying Levinas to psychotherapeutic contexts, the authors define several areas in the research that are ripe for future exploration, expansion, and consolidation.
Over the course of six decades, Emmanuel Levinas developed a radical understanding of time. Like ... more Over the course of six decades, Emmanuel Levinas developed a radical understanding of time. Like Martin Heidegger, Levinas saw the everyday experience of synchronous time marked by clocks and calendars as an abstraction from the way time functions more fundamentally. Yet, in a definitive break from Heideggers analysis of temporality, by the end of his career Levinass philosophy of time becomes the linchpin for his argument that the other person has priority over the self. For Levinas, time is a feature of the selfs encounter with the face, and it is his understanding of time that makes possible his radical claim that ethics is first philosophy.
This paper seeks to understand how the ever-changing idea and function of generations perpetuates... more This paper seeks to understand how the ever-changing idea and function of generations perpetuates the need for tradition, and how traditions shape the understanding of responsibility and justice. For help in thinking about responsibility as it relates to the transmission of generations, the article turns to Emmanuel Levinas, a philosopher of responsibility par excellence , who offers a philosophy of obligation that is unwaveringly anarchic, challenging traditional configurations of ethics. Within the tension between Levinas and traditional approaches to responsibility, there resides an opportunity to rethink the role of generationality in philosophy and ethics. The paper explores this possibility, and points to a form of responsibility that attends to the porous and precarious sense of life that modern humans have too often forgotten.
This essay takes up the critical importance of Levinas’s work for mental health care and explores... more This essay takes up the critical importance of Levinas’s work for mental health care and explores the timeliness and relevance of Levinas’s concerns in relationship to the contemporary shape of the clinical disciplines. The authors provide a critical assessment of the existing literature on Levinas and psychology by chronicling and examining the realms of clinical scholarship and theory to which Levinas’s work has been applied. After arguing for the substantial value of this intersectional literature and addressing the current impediments involved in applying Levinas to psychotherapeutic contexts, the authors define several areas in the research that are ripe for future exploration, expansion, and consolidation.
Over the course of six decades, Emmanuel Levinas developed a radical understanding of time. Like ... more Over the course of six decades, Emmanuel Levinas developed a radical understanding of time. Like Martin Heidegger, Levinas saw the everyday experience of synchronous time marked by clocks and calendars as an abstraction from the way time functions more fundamentally. Yet, in a definitive break from Heideggers analysis of temporality, by the end of his career Levinass philosophy of time becomes the linchpin for his argument that the other person has priority over the self. For Levinas, time is a feature of the selfs encounter with the face, and it is his understanding of time that makes possible his radical claim that ethics is first philosophy.
This paper seeks to understand how the ever-changing idea and function of generations perpetuates... more This paper seeks to understand how the ever-changing idea and function of generations perpetuates the need for tradition, and how traditions shape the understanding of responsibility and justice. For help in thinking about responsibility as it relates to the transmission of generations, the article turns to Emmanuel Levinas, a philosopher of responsibility par excellence , who offers a philosophy of obligation that is unwaveringly anarchic, challenging traditional configurations of ethics. Within the tension between Levinas and traditional approaches to responsibility, there resides an opportunity to rethink the role of generationality in philosophy and ethics. The paper explores this possibility, and points to a form of responsibility that attends to the porous and precarious sense of life that modern humans have too often forgotten.
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