Emmanuel Levinas and His Interlocutors

“Professor Hanoch Ben-Pazi places Emmanuel Levinas in a fascinating and profound dialogue with more than a dozen leading contemporary philosophers, including Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig, Jean-Paul Sartre, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Joseph Ber Soloveitchik. However, Ben-Pazi surprisingly and compellingly argues that Levinas’ 'primary role model' was the oft-forgotten Parisian Jewish humanist, Léon Brunschvicg.”

— Warren Zev Harvey, Professor Emeritus, Department of Jewish Thought, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

“In this beautiful book, Hanoch Ben-Pazi invites the reader to participate in four philosophical encounters between different major thinkers of the twentieth century. These meetings are either imagined or reconstructed against the backdrop of exchanges that actually took place between these thinkers during discussions whose issues still concern our modernity. Levinas is the guest of honor. Known for his predilection for ethics, and for his singular way of thinking about Judaism in tune with major philosophical questions, this philosopher delivers neither lectures, nor narrowly confessional remarks. Rather Ben-Pazi invites various high-quality guests to come and meet him. However, he is not content merely to reconstruct these exchanges but also joins the conversation, with relevance and audacity, often taking a step back to emphasize what seems most important to him. He wants to encourage readers to listen well since it is indeed the humanity of all of us that is at stake.”

— Catherine Chalier, Professor Emeritus of philosophy, Nanterre University

“By placing Levinas in direct conversation with a range of thinkers from Gandhi to Derrida, and by drawing on the philosophers who influenced Levinas’s thinking, Hanoch Ben-Pazi has produced a stunning book that situates Levinas’s work in a wider context. By also focusing on Levinas’s broad range of themes, Ben-Pazi provides his readers not only with a deeper understanding but also a more complex picture of Levinas’s ethical project.”

— Claire Katz, Professor of Philosophy and Education, Texas A&M University