Ethics of otherness and Judaism by Emmanuel Levinas and implications for religion and human rights

Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas is of Jewish origin; born in Lithuania, he has lived, for his Jewish condition, the horrors of Second World War. His ethical proposal finds roots in the Jewish atmosphere, what provides him a hard criticism to the western thought. According to him, instead of proposing an ethics, it proposed a philosophy of the power. For him the ethics precedes not only the Philosophy and also the Theology and the Human Rights, so that the implication of Levinas’ thought to the religion and the Human Rights is to put the relationship, the meeting with the Other as previous to any theme to keep the ethics and to avoid summarizing the Other in the Same.