Hermeneutics and ontology in Levinas

Abstract

This work deals with Levinas’s concept of hermeneutics and his critical arguments against Martin Heidegger’s ontology. For Levinas, ethics is the founding philosophy. Thus, we try to emphasize not only his criticism towards the question of Being expressed in Sein und Zeit, but also his reaction against the totality of Western philosophical tradition. Levinas did this through the philosophical concept of autrement qu’être (otherwise than being). It may be concluded that Levinas really created an original model of thought that abandons the primacy of ontology, which is the crucial point of his philosophy and his hermeneutical perspective.