In Humanism of the Other, Emmanuel Levinas argues that it is not only possible but of the highest exigency to understand one's humanity through the humanity of others. Based in a new appreciation for ethics, and taking new distances from the phenomenology of Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, the idealism of Plato and Kant, and the skepticism of Nietzsche and Blanchot, Levinas rehabilitates humanism and restores its promises. He expresses disappointment with the revolutions that became bureaucracies and totalitarian governments, and the national liberation movements that eventually led to oppression and international wars. Defining the human as subject, ego, synthesis, identification, cognition, and mood all too easily lead to subjugation, persecution, and murder. Painfully aware of the long history of dehumanization which reached its apotheosis in Hitler and Nazism, Levinas does not underestimate the difficulty of reconciling oneself with another. The humanity of the human, Levinas argues, is not discoverable through mathematics, rational metaphysics or introspection. Rather, it is found in the recognition that the suffering and mortality of others are the obligations and morality of the self.

September 30, 2000, Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip. State-owned France 2 TV channel reports the shooting of a Palestinian youth, Mohamed Al Dura and the wounding of his father Jamal, "targets of gunfire from the Israeli position." Jerusalem bureau chief Charles Enderlin intones, "the child is dead, his father critically wounded." The accusation enflames the news stream, ignites a wave of Jew hatred unlike anything known since the Shoah. Blood libel. Israelis are branded as child-killers. A war of atrocities, the "Al Aqsa Intifada," is unleashed against Israeli civilians, Jews by the thousands are attacked in France and throughout Europe. Is the "death of Mohamed al Dura" a news broadcast? Or is it a staged scene, the creation of a myth, a lethal narrative launched in a war of conquest disguised as the pathetic cries of helpless victims. How did a crudely fabricated video leap into Western media from a Palestinian source and circulate without encountering a critical eye? Astute observers did in fact notice incongruities in the fleeting images of the alleged incident. They have investigated, analyzed, reported on their findings. But it takes something more than rational exposes to counter an explosive myth."

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95) placed ethics at the foundation of philosophy; during his life, which spanned almost the entire twentieth century, he witnessed devastating events that could not have been more demanding of that philosophical stance. Unforeseen History covers the years 1929-92, providing a wide overview of Levinas's work - especially his views on aesthetics and Judaism - offering examples of his precise thinking at work in small essays, long essays, and interviews. The earliest essays in Unforeseen History discuss phenomenology, a subject Levinas introduced to a great many French thinkers, including Jean-Paul Sartre. In his prescient 1934 essay Some Thoughts on the Philosophy of Hitlerism, moreover, he confronted a philosophy that had yet to manifest itself fully in cataclysm.

The popular conception of the Renaissance as a culture devoted to order and perfection does not account for an important characteristic of Renaissance art: many of the period's major works, including those by da Vinci, Erasmus, Michelangelo, Ronsard, and Montaigne, appeared as works-in-progress, always liable to changes and additions. In "Perpetual Motion, " Michel Jeanneret argues for a sixteenth century swept up in change and fascinated by genesis and metamorphosis.

Jeanneret begins by tracing the metamorphic sensibility in sixteenth-century science and culture. Theories of creation and cosmology, of biology and geology, profoundly affected the perspectives of leading thinkers and artists on the nature of matter and form. The conception of humanity (as understood by Pico de Mirandola, Erasmus, Rabelais, and others), reflections upon history, the theory and practice of language, all led to new ideas, new genres, and a new interest in the diversity of experience. Jeanneret goes on to show that the invention of the printing press did not necessarily produce more stable literary texts than those transmitted orally or as hand-printed manuscripts--authors incorporated ideas of transformation into the process of composing and revising and encouraged creative interpretations from their readers, translators, and imitators. Extending the argument to the visual arts, Jeanneret considers da Vinci's sketches and paintings, changing depictions of the world map, the mythological sculptures in the gardens of Prince Orsini in Bomarzo, and many other Renaissance works. More than fifty illustrations supplement his analysis.