PHL217H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Unintended Consequences, Existentialism, Pragmatics
Thursday, March 17, 2016
PHL217 - Lecture 16
Levinas
-Focus is on the victims of all genocides, not just the Holocaust
-How we might take responsibility for the things we are responsible for even though
we didn’t do them
-Being has a claim upon us that requires us to do a kind of thinking
•as such it is the destiny of our thinking
•Being destines us, commits us - we are its agent
•our thinking is bound to being
•not an autonomous model
•gives to being if not the agency of agent
•we experience ourselves as claimed by that coming and going
-What it would mean for ontology to be fundamental
•which is Heidegger’s claim in Being and Time
•when someone tries to know something, they are already in a factual situation
•our minds are temporal (they are in time) (Heidegger)
-122 - this giving-ness has a kind of brutality
•creates a tension in being
•what it means to live as a human being and also try to think about it, not be a slave
•to be in this way human is to be in a relationship to this possibility of truth
-Refused Sartre’s kind of existential philosophy
•philosophy is a kind of holding on to life - H is uncertain about this
•not a kind of intellectualism, but a kind of manual manipulation of things that is
actually a comprehension
•we don’t actually have to think so much
!1
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Document Summary
Focus is on the victims of all genocides, not just the holocaust. How we might take responsibility for the things we are responsible for even though we didn"t do them. Our responsibility is not equal to our consciousness. But he was interested in a kind of openness: human beings inhabit the space in which being appears, ontology comes to existence in the open. More about understanding than knowing: he"s still presenting heidegger (123, for heidegger, it"s all about comprehension, grabbing something, it rests on the openness of being. Heidegger has spoken about beings with others, but levinas says the other person isn"t there waiting for him to let him/her be. !2: the other person calls to me, in a way that entities do not call, the person is involved in an invocation, not in its being, i am already speaking to. Thursday, march 17, 2016 him: speech denotes an original relation.
