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John of the Cross (1542-1591), a Christian theologian and Catholic priest born in Spain, lived through the worst of the Spanish Inquisition. Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995), a Jewish philosopher and layman born in Lithuania, lived through the 1917 Russian Revolution and the collapse of the old regime. What, then, brings these two eminent thinkers together: one from the upheavals of 16th-century Spain; the other from war-torn 20th-century France and Germany? Simply put, both of these men refused to start their reflection on life and God from self-contained abstract principles; rather, their point of departure was the ambiguity and complexity of the character of human nature. From this starting point, both are led to a God without or beyond Being. After a comparative analysis of their God talk, the following questions are explored: How do we speak about God? What are the consequences of John’s and Levinas’ radical negation of the Being of God?

This article reconsiders the sixteenth-century Idealist Neo-Confucian philosophy of Wang Yangming (1472–1529) in light of the development of twentieth-century Latin American liberation theology. After defining liberation theology, this study identifies the crucial contributions made to it by Emmanuel Levinas’s assertion of the primacy of ethics over ontology and critique of the egocentric nature of Western philosophy. It then delineates the epistemological and deontological criticisms made of Roman Catholic orthodoxy—and institutionalized Christianity in general—by Latin American liberation theologians, particularly Enrique Dussel and José Porfirio Miranda. These are compared with Wang’s critique of the Rationalist Neo-Confucianism that had been official orthodoxy and the legitimating philosophy for imperial China for three centuries. The study finds that Wang’s Idealist philosophy incorporates epistemological, spiritual, and ethical perspectives with powerful democratic and liberationist elements that prefigure the development of late-twentieth-century Latin American liberation theology. Thus, contrary to the conventional view of Confucianism as a conservative philosophy, these elements in Wang’s Neo-Confucianism render it a theology (or philosophy) of liberation.

Saemaul Undong, also called the New Village or Community Movement, was a community-based development programme promoted in the Republic of Korea during President Park’s regime in the 1970s. To reduce the urban-rural income gap in a relatively short period of time (the decade of the 1970s), it has brought unprecedented success, as seen in South Korea’s overall socioeconomic improvements and decrease of extreme poverty. Based on the movement’s contributions, individual research and public discourse have argued for the potential of applying Saemaul Undong’s strategies and activities to developing countries. Nevertheless, the movement’s weaknesses, such as the government’s ignorance of the particular needs of rural populations and the sustenance of dictatorship, imply the necessity for fundamental changes in the goals and policies of Saemaul Undong before it can be utilised for different contexts. This article explores how the limitations of Saemaul Undong should be amended.ContributionThis article utilises Emmanuel Levinas’ ‘Ethics of the Other’ as an effective framework that can be used to critique, in particular, the top-down and ambitious approach of the movement and address the significance of responsible leadership that, with hospitality, promotes a just society by being attentive to the suffering of socially vulnerable populations, concerning their dignity, uniqueness, and equality.

In this article I interpret Améry’s claims about the temporal dimension of trauma in the light of Levinas’s reflections on suffering and responses to suffering—and how both reject the temptation to generate narratives in which pain serves as a step toward transcendence and self-determination. That temptation finds support in Nietzsche’s critique of resentment, which identifies the refusal to forget as pathological, and against which Améry defends himself by demanding a substantive, intersubjective process of working-off the unjust past. I argue that for Levinas and Améry, progressive narratives intensify the moral inattention that normalizes the initial infliction of suffering, and that revising how we understand time is necessary to respond ethically to trauma and human vulnerability more broadly. In light of that analysis, I consider contemporary examples of memorialization and the assumptions about time that they reveal.

Introduction This article explores the clinical encounter not merely as a site for technical intervention or diagnostic reasoning, but as a complex event where epistemology and ethics converge. Challenging the reduction of medicine to scientific protocols, it argues for a conceptual reorientation grounded in language and human relationality. The encounter between clinician and patient is framed as both an epistemic inquiry and a moral covenant, where understanding a patient’s condition requires access not only to biological data but to their social, cultural, and linguistic lifeworld. While the sciences offer truth about the body, they do not suffice to grasp the full existential dimension of illness. Language thus becomes central—not only as a medium of communication, but as the very space where knowledge and care are shaped and shared. It is in and through language that ethical responsibility toward the patient is enacted. Method This article synthesizes a philosophical investigation into the ethical and linguistic foundations of medical practice. Drawing on the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Émile Benveniste, Emmanuel Levinas, and decolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant, it develops a theoretical framework that helps to clarify how subjectivity, vulnerability, and responsibility emerge in and through language during the clinical encounter. The approach is conceptual and interpretive, grounded in close textual analysis and oriented toward the ethical implications of these philosophical insights within the medical practice. Findings From this analysis emerges a critique of dominant ontological assumptions within Western medicine, particularly its tendency to assimilate the Other into pre-existing categories, thereby enacting a form of epistemic violence. Levinas’s distinction between the Said ( le Dit ) and the Saying ( le Dire ) becomes central to this critique. The Said corresponds to propositional knowledge and thematic discourse—typical of clinical reasoning—while the Saying signals a more primordial ethical relation: an act of exposure, vulnerability, and responsibility toward the Other. Proximity, as defined by Levinas, is not a spatial or cognitive closeness but an ethical immediacy—a face-to-face relation where the Other appears as irreducibly singular. Humboldt’s and Benveniste’s linguistic theories reinforce this view by emphasizing that subjectivity is dialogical and relational rather than autonomous and pregiven. In contrast to Habermas’s emphasis on validity claims and rational consensus, Levinas privileges the irreducible alterity of the Other as the foundation of ethical life, a move that reframes the conditions under which medical knowledge and care become possible. Discussion These philosophical insights have profound implications for the medical practice. When in a clinical encounter, the patients do not merely present symptoms to be categorized—they bring a world that demands ethical attention. Medical language, far from being neutral, reconfigures how illness is understood and treated. The difference between saying a patient “has diabetes,” “suffers from diabetes,” or “is diabetic” reflects deeper assumptions about identity and embodiment. The ethical quality of care hinges on such linguistic choices. Through the lens of Levinas’s Saying, the patient’s voice is heard not simply as information but as a call to responsibility. Moreover, when placed in conversation with decolonial thinkers, this analysis reveals the extent to which colonial and racialized logics continue to shape medical practice. Fanon’s critique of the objectification of Black bodies, and Glissant’s defense of “opacity” against totalizing knowledge systems, highlight how patients are often forced into identities that obscure their singularity. The ethical demand of the clinical encounter thus resists any framework—biological, social, or racial—that seeks to fully determine the patient in advance of relation. Conclusion The article concludes that ethical responsibility in medicine arises not from what is known about the patient, but from a willingness to engage with what remains unknown and unknowable—their singularity, vulnerability, and alterity. The clinical encounter is reimagined as a moral space where language becomes the medium through which care is not only delivered but ethically constituted. In this reconfiguration, the practice of medicine moves beyond procedural norms and toward a relational ethics rooted in proximity and attentiveness. By bringing together Levinas’s philosophy of language and responsibility with decolonial critiques of medical rationality, the article calls for a fundamental transformation in how healing is conceived: not as mastery over the body, but as a dialogical and ethical relation between singular beings.

This article defends Cavell and Levinas’ view that anti-skeptical arguments cannot attain universal assent. In the first half of the article, I argue that Conant’s reading of Cavell is mistaken in two respects: he ignores Cavell’s inheritance of Kant as well as the differences Cavell emphasizes between external world and other minds skepticism. In the second half of the paper, I examine affinities between Cavell and Levinas’ thought, viz., acknowledging the facticity of the other and their remarks on skepticism. I close the paper by noting three metaphysical and ethical truths that arise from Cavell’s way with skepticism.

Howard Caygill systematically explores for the first time the relationship between Levinas' thought and the political. From Levinas' early writings in the face of National Socialism to controversial political statements on Israeli and French politics, Caygill analyses themes such as the deconstruction of metaphysics, embodiment, the face and alterity.He also examines Levinas' engagement with his contemporaries Heidegger and Bataille, and the implications of his rethinking of the political for an understanding of the Holocaust.

Emmanuel Levinas conceives of our lives as fundamentally interpersonal and ethical, claiming that our responsibilities to one another should shape all of our actions. While many scholars believe that Levinas failed to develop a robust view of political ethics, Michael L. Morgan argues against understandings of Levinas's thought that find him politically wanting or even antipolitical. Morgan examines Levinas's ethical critique of the political as well as his Jewish writings-including those on Zionism and the founding of the Jewish state-which are controversial reflections of Levinas's political expression. Unlike others who dismiss Levinas as irrelevant or anarchical, Morgan is the first to give extensive treatment to Levinas as a serious social political thinker whose ethics must be understood in terms of its political implications. Morgan reveals Levinas's political commitments to liberalism and democracy as well as his revolutionary conception of human life as deeply interconnected on philosophical, political, and religious grounds.

This monograph initiates the conversation between Levinas and postcolonial theory through a zig-zag reading, asking both how postcolonial theory challenges so many Levinasian concepts and how a Levinasian ethics is crucial for the normative dimension of postcolonial thinking.