Les principes que la Grèce ignorait. Rosenzweig and Levinas on Language, Ethics and Jewish Heritage

FONTI, DIEGO

Jahrbuch für Religionsphilosophie

Karl Alber

Lugar: Freiburg im Breisgau; Año: 2014 vol. 12 p. 71 - 89

1619-9588

The purpose of this paper is to show how two influential Jewish philosophers, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas, offer an answer to the relationship between particularity and universality by resorting to their own Jewish heritage. Within philosophical Western thought, this relationship was habitually one of submission of alterity and eradication of difference. On the other hand, both philosophers begin with a hermeneutics of communication, that is, with a philosophy of language based on the facticity of language in its actual being spoken. But this hermeneutics is dependent upon a horizon of understanding inherited from the Jewish tradition. This understanding includes a kind of responsibility for the other and for the communication itself, that is, a kind of heteronomy which has to be put in dialogue with the modern concept of autonomy. And a third aspect of this conceptualization of language is the prophetic element included in every genuine communication. Finally, it is argued that Judaism with its "search for universality" based on Scripture is a primary model for other groups searching for recognition of their alterity and of the universal value of their heritage. (Indexado en Dialnet, CIRC B, Erihplus)