New Book Defends Talmudic Scholar Emmanuel Levinas
Joshua James Shaw, assistant professor of philosophy at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, has published a new book challenging critics of 20th century philosopher and Talmudic scholar Emmanuel Levinas.
Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics: Putting Ethics First (Cambria Press) rebuts the idea that Levinas championed an impractical expectation of human compassion. Shaw defends Levinas’ sensitivity to the vulnerable as an understandable consequence of his Holocaust experience.
Conscripted into the French army while teaching in Paris, Levinas, a Lithuanian Jew, survived the Holocaust as a prisoner of war protected by the Geneva Conventions. His wife and baby daughter were hidden in a French monastery by a family friend; his parents and siblings were killed outright or died in concentration camps. 
As a result, “Levinas became obsessed with making sense of what he called ‘face to face encounters with the other’—situations where one sees another person suffering and feels a sense of unconditional compassion for them, and an absolute responsibility to help them,” Shaw says. “His writings examine why, if compassion is a pervasive feature of our day-to-day lives, we often overlook or ignore our responsibility to help one another.”
Shaw argues that Levinas is best read as a pragmatic thinker who did consider the practical expression of his ethics. “In this way, my book offers interpretations of how Levinas—or any of us—can put an ethics of unconditional care and compassion into practice using very concrete principles of justice.”
Shaw holds a doctoral degree from Indiana University, Bloomington. He earned his master's degree at University of Chicago, and undergraduate degree at Bard College. He has published pieces in Hypatia, Film-Philosophy, Newsletter of the American Society for Aesthetics, and the Post-Graduate Journal of Aesthetics, and has made conference presentations on Levinas, feminist philosophy, and the intersection of ethics and aesthetics.
Emmanuel Levinas on the Priority of Ethics: Putting Ethics First can be purchased at cambriapress.com.