
Levinas, Ethics and Law
Matthew Stone(Author)
Edinburgh University Press
Published on 22. February 2018
Book
Paperback/Softback
184 pages
978-1-4744-3254-2 (ISBN)
Description
Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of ethics has frequently attracted attention amongst legal scholars, but he remains a divisive and often enigmatic contributor to this field. He has been read within contexts as varied as human rights, private law, refugee law, and on the nature of judicial reasoning. This book explores what unites such apparently diverse applications of his ideas, and in doing so considers the challenge of law's ethical relationship with the other.
In addition to asking how Levinas's ethics can inform legal problems, the book also examines how the modern legal edifice has a deceptive tendency to close itself off from the ethical experience. In particular, literatures on biopolitics suggest that law is increasingly complicit in reductive determinations of how we understand ourselves and others. Levinas's most penetrating insight might not, therefore, lie in the law's instrumentalisation of his ethics, but instead in the way his ethics trace a human encounter that escapes law.
In addition to asking how Levinas's ethics can inform legal problems, the book also examines how the modern legal edifice has a deceptive tendency to close itself off from the ethical experience. In particular, literatures on biopolitics suggest that law is increasingly complicit in reductive determinations of how we understand ourselves and others. Levinas's most penetrating insight might not, therefore, lie in the law's instrumentalisation of his ethics, but instead in the way his ethics trace a human encounter that escapes law.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 231 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 13 mm
Weight
272 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4744-3254-2 (9781474432542)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Matthew Stone
Levinas, Ethics and Law
E-Book
07/2016
1st Edition
Edinburgh University Press
€24.49
Available for download
Person
Matthew Stone is Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Essex. He is co-editor of New Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political (2012) and is author of numerous journal articles on critical legal theory.
Content
Acknowledgements; Part I: The Importance of Ethics; 1. Introduction: The Law's Other; 2. The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas; Part II: Ethics and Law; 3. Can Law Be Ethical?; 4. Adjudication, Obligation, and Human Rights: Applying Levinas's Ethics; Part III: Ethics Against the Law; 5. The Law of the Same: Levinas and the Biopolitical Limits of Liberalism; 6. Law, Ethics, and Political Subjectivity; Bibliography; Index.