Reviews for The Derrida-Habermas Reader

The average rating for The Derrida-Habermas Reader based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-05-26 00:00:00 John Marshall Moyn does a really nice job of situating Levinas in the intellectual moment that created him, at the intersection of phenomenology and theology in the pre-WWII era. He pitches Levinas's ethical turn as the product of an urge to come up with an alternative to Heidegger's account of humanity in Being and Time, and he locates the raw materials that Levinas draws on in the reaction against humanist and rationalist theology of the 19th century: namely Karl Barth and Rosenzweig. The downsides are that Moyn stops short of really engaging with Levinas's writing itself, and he tends to repeat the same ideas across chapters (lending itself to the sense that the book was written as several essays and then stitched together). His thesis is that Levinas's thought has a theological foundation, and it therefore cannot be treated as "pure" (secular) philosophy in the way that Levinas says it should be. But, despite demonstrating the theological heritage of Levinas's ideas, it would require more actual engagement with the philosopher's writing directly to fully support this thesis. The historical itinerary of an idea doesn't necessarily reveal its logical basis, and it is this latter aspect that is most crucial for figuring out what can be kept and what must be discarded for moral philosophy.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-11-28 00:00:00 Stefano Ley This is an interesting historicization of Levinas' thought, although not unproblematic. Moyn asserts that there is, indeed, a moment when Levinas "discovers" the ethical.