Levinas's idea of ethics as a relation of responsibility to the other person has become a highly influential and recognizable position across a wide range of academic and non-academic fields. Simon Critchley's aim in this book is to provide a less familiar, more troubling, and (hopefully) truer account of Levinas's work. A new dramatic method for reading Levinas is proposed, where the fundamental problem of his work is seen as the attempt to escape from the tragedy of Heidegger's philosophy and the way in which that philosophy shaped political events in the last century. Extensive and careful attention is paid to Levinas' fascinating but often overlooked work from the 1930s, where the proximity to Heidegger becomes clearer. Levinas's problem is very simple: how to escape from the tragic fatality of being as described by Heidegger. Levinas's later work is a series of attempts to answer that problem through claims about ethical selfhood and a series of phenomenological experiences, especially erotic relations and the relation to the child. These claims are analyzed in the book through close textual readings. Critchley reveals the problem with Levinas's answer to his own philosophical question and suggests a number of criticisms, particular concerning the question of gender. In the final, speculative part of the book, another answer to Levinas's problem is explored through a reading of the Song of Songs and the lens of mystical love.

A reclamation of experience as the foremost concept in the work of William James, and a powerful argument for the continuing importance of his philosophy. How does one deploy experience without succumbing to a foundationalist epistemology or an account of the subject rooted in immediately given objects of consciousness? In the wake of the so-called linguistic turn of the twentieth century, this is a question anyone thinking philosophically about experience must ask. Alexis Dianda answers through a reading of the pragmatic tradition, culminating in a defense of the role of experience in William James’s thought. Dianda argues that by reconstructing James’s philosophical project, we can locate a model of experience that not only avoids what Wilfrid Sellars called “the myth of the given” but also enriches pragmatism broadly. First, Dianda identifies the motivations for and limitations of linguistic nominalism, insisting that critics of experience focus too narrowly on justification and epistemic practices. Then, by emphasizing how James’s concept of experience stresses the lived, affective, and nondiscursive, the argument holds that a more robust notion of experience is necessary to reflect not just how we know but how we act. The Varieties of Experience provides a novel reconstruction of the relationship between psychology, moral thought, epistemology, and religion in James’s work, demonstrating its usefulness in tackling issues such as the relevance of perception to knowledge and the possibility of moral change. Against the tide of neopragmatic philosophers such as Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom, who argue that a return to experience must entail appeals to foundationalism or representationalism, Dianda’s intervention rethinks not only the value and role of experience but also the aims and resources of pragmatic philosophy today.