This article explores the significance of the work of Emmanuel Levinas for the philosophy of religion. Levinas is well‐known as the philosopher of the face of the other which provokes infinite responsibility. In his account of ethical responsibility to the other he regularly employs religious references, though rarely with extended explanations. This article considers a variety of interpretations of these religious references. Given the importance of Judaism for Levinas, we first examine whether Levinas should be understood as a philosopher or (...) Jewish thinker, presenting arguments on both sides of this debate. We then investigate the relationship between ethics and religion in Levinas’s work, including consideration of the Akedah and the problem of evil. We conclude with explorations of the relationship between reason and revelation and the question of how we ought to think about God. These reflections elucidate the contribution Levinas makes to the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

In recent years, a growing number of thinkers have criticized the use of human rights as an international standard. It is the thesis of this essay that by addressing these critics from a Levinasian ethical framework, rather than a Kantian one, we can formulate a conception of human rights that is viable for a pluralistic, international community. Though Levinas’s ethics retains an affinity to Kant’s, the divergence of Levinas’s theory from Kant’s on the issues of autonomy/heteronomy and the role of (...) reason in ethics opens up new possibilities for conceptualizing human rights. By exploring these two divergences, I willshow that a Levinasian framework prioritizes the ethical demands of others in a way that invites both a fallibilistic commitment to and an ongoing critique ofhuman rights. (shrink)