THE PROBLEM OF METHOD IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF EMMANUEL LEVINAS

The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas challenges the foundation of Western thought by postulating an idea of infinity, an "otherwise than Being," which disrupts the absolute unity of Being. However, in attempting to examine this disruption philosophically, the coherence of Levinas' language and the very possibility of his position become questionable. In this dissertation I analyze Levinas' philosophical method, and specifically the essential conjunction between his method and his style, in order to demonstrate how his discourse avoids paradox and how his method exposes a radically new significance within philosophical inquiry.;Second, I elucidate the structure of Levinas' method as a "reduction" by showing how his inquiry in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence proceeds by means of a series of questions and their appropriate methodological responses. Levinas "reduces" the ontological signification of language as the manifestation of Being to the ethical signification of language as a primordial responsibility to and for the other person.;Finally, I argue that Levinas justifies the possibility of his philosophy and maintains its openness to criticism by means of his diachronic transcendental method. The diachronic structure of philosophical discourse, the fact that it is necessarily addressed to an interlocutor, prevents the formulation of a transparently founded transcendental system of signification. Levinas' method exposes an ethical significance within philosophical inquiry by means of specific stylistic devices which render every position continually vulnerable to further questioning. In response to Derrida's critique of Levinas, I argue that the style in which his method is formulated enables him to speak of an "otherwise than Being" in the language of Being because it preserves the possibility of a philosophical discourse as an appeal and a response to an interlocutor without demanding a systematic methodology.;There are three principal elements in my analysis. First, to provide an entry point into Levinas' philosophy I examine the influences of Husserl and Heidegger on his method. Although his thinking begins in phenomenology, his rejection of the phenomenological conception of evidence as the presence of consciousness to its object enables him to exceed the phenomenological framework. He finds a temporal discontinuity or a "diachrony" within experience and claims that the relation of the subject to another person occurs outside of any possible "evidence.".