In this book, I have discussed the nation of the experience of the ethical in post-Kantain philosophers Heidegger and Derrida. I have pointed to the central strategy of transcendental strategy which relies on a concept of freedom in itscosmological meaning. I focused on the Heşdeggerian challenge to Kantain transcendental ethics an arguedthat Derrşda's reading of Heideggeroffers fiction as the origin of ethics contrary to Kant's transcendental strategy. Finally I conclude that, Derrida's fictional transcendence, rather than opposing as generally viewed, is close to holistic pragmatism.

Ethics and Danger examines Heidegger’s association with German National Socialism and attempts to understand both the question of politics in Heidegger’s thought and the thought that gives rise to that question. It explores the contribution of Heidegger’s work to issues of ethics, technology, and social theory, as well as his relationship to other thinkers such as Parmenides, Aristotle, Hegel, Husserl, Benjamin, Levinas, Rorty, Foucault, and Derrida. Finally, it addresses the more general question of the future of ethical thought within continental philosophy. In order to engage the ethical issues surrounding Heidegger’s life and thought, the authors speak of dangers such as facism and the facile, self-congratulatory moral stance that Heidegger exemplifies. The question of how to speak in the wake of Heidegger’s thought takes many forms, and the answers represent a diversity of viewpoints from both American and continental thinkers.

This original contribution to the ethical and political significance of philosophy addresses a number of major themes—identity, violence, the erotic, freedom, responsibility, religious belief, globalization—and critically engages with the work of Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, and Levinas. It promotes a unique blend of deconstructive critique and a certain English skepticism, leading to the affirmation of a negative capability—a patience and vigilance in the face of both human folly and philosophy's own homegrown pathologies. The author argues for the extension of our sense of openness and responsibility to animal life, and indeed life in general, and not just to the human.

In this research, the author analyzes Derrida's understanding of the way society is created out of a collection of individuals, how the individuals preserve their singularity and freedom within a social system and the meaning of ethics, as it comes out in his early writings. In this work, the researcher used a phenomenological method of research and Cassirer's way of analyzing the symbolic forms as a framework to analyze the early writing of Derrida. Although it is not a common approach to combine Derrida's philosophy with that of Cassirer's, the researcher found that Cassirer's ideas help to show Derrida's unique position.

Although both Levinas and Heidegger drew inspiration from Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method and helped pave the way toward the post-structuralist movement of the late twentieth century, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the relation of these two thinkers. There are plenty of simple—and accurate—oppositions and juxtapositions: French and German, ethics and ontology, and so on. But there is also a critical intersection between Levinas and Heidegger on some of the most fundamental philosophical questions: What does it mean to be, to think, and to act in late modern life and culture? How do our conceptions of subjectivity, time, and history both reflect the condition of this historical moment and open up possibilities for critique, resistance, and transformation? The contributors to this volume take up these questions by engaging the ideas of Levinas and Heidegger relating to issues of power, violence, secularization, history, language, time, death, sacrifice, responsibility, memory, and the boundary between the human and humanism.

Simon Critchley's first book, 'The Ethics of Deconstruction', was originally published to great acclaim in 1992. It was the first book to argue for the ethical turn in Derrida's work and to show as powerfully as possible how deconstruction has persuasive ethical consequences that are vital to our thinking through of questions of politics and democracy. This new edition contains three new appendixes and a new preface where Critchley reflects upon the origins, motivation and reception of 'The Ethics of Deconstruction'.

For Greek antiquity, the question of right or fitting measure constituted the very heart of both ethics and politics. But can the Good of the ethical life and the Justice of the political be reduced to measurement and calculation? If they are matters of measure, are they not also absolutely immeasurable? In critical dialogue with texts by Plato, Hölderlin, Rilke, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Levi, the author argues that the question of measure has become ever more urgent in the context of a modernity pressured by the conditions of a technological economy and a relativism that threatens to destroy a vital sense of moral responsibility and the commitment to justice that underlies the possibility of freedom. Conceived as a task for the “metaphysics” of memory, this book explores the normative problematic of measure, bringing its deeply buried redemptive promise to appearance in our gestures, uses and abuses of the hands, the dialectic of tact, and the manners of social existence.

The core source of this book is the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Beginning with a chapter on speaking and the other, three lead chapters focus on Levinas' account of the face of the other. These chapters are followed by explorations of the ethics of dissemination in Derrida, the freedom of the other in Sartre, the cultural other in Husserlian phenomenology, the other as sexual difference in Irigaray and Nietzsche, the sublime in aesthetics, and the deconstruction of the primacy of the ego in Foucault and Lacan. This book is especially relevant to feminist theory. It shows that postmodern, continental philosophy does indeed have ethical implications. The question of the other or the presence of the other undercuts the foundationalist starting points of ethical theory and epistemology. The Question of the Other presents fresh and original interpretations of Husserl, Nietzsche, Derrida, Levinas, Irigaray, Foucault, Lacan, Heidegger, and Sartre.

In Ethics–Politics–Subjectivity, Simon Critchley takes up three questions at the centre of contemporary theoretical debate: What is ethical experience? What can be said of the subject who has this experience? What, if any, is the relation of ethical experience to politics? These questions are approached by way of a critical confrontation with a number of major thinkers, including Lacan, Genet, Blanchot, Nancy, Rorty and, in particular, Levinas and Derrida. Critchley offers a critical reconstruction of Levinas's notion of ethical experience and, questioning the religious pietism and political conservatism of the dominant interpretation of Levinas's work, develops an ethics of finitude which, far from being tragic, opens on to an experience of humour and the comic. Using this reading of Levinas as a way of unlocking the rich ethical potential of Derrida's work, Critchley outlines and defends the political possibilities of deconstruction. On the basis of Derrida's recent work, Critchley attempts to rethink notions of friendship, democracy, economics and technology.

Engages Levinas and Heidegger on the provocative issue of an ethics of things.