Join us in Rm. MLU203 for a colloquium on ethics presented by Josh Gallogly (MA in Theology candidate, field of Public Faith and Spirituality) Points of Departure: The Ethical Person and the Problems of the Irreducibility, Exteriority, and Incommensurability in Levinas and Bonhoeffer.
Abstract: "The topic of this paper is a comparison of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s arguments on the meaning, content, and conditions of ethics. I argue that a close analysis of their major writings will reveal significant points of agreement between Bonhoeffer’s Christological/sociological construction of ethics and Levinas’s phenomenological investigations into the ethical encounter with the Other. These similarities can be summarized in the presentation of the concrete person in an ethical relation of responsibility to a transcendent Other, as exemplified in the problems of irreducibility, exteriority, and incommensurability. In both cases, I will trace the movement of their ethical thought as attempts to articulate the proper point of departure for all subsequent philosophy. Further, I will locate both arguments in the broader context of continental philosophy as critical responses to post-Kantian transcendental idealism and ontology."