Primacy of Ethics Upon Philosophy in Levinas

This article considers the primacy of ethics upon philosophy in Levinas’s thought. Having focus on “Other” in his philosophy, Levinas looks radically different view at traditional ethics and concepts such as other, face, infinity, transcendence are opposite concepts as I, totality, and imminence. He believes that ethics is primacy upon philosophy and regards ethics as kind of first philosophy which is essentially other than western first philosophy. Of course, Levinas points that first philosophy includes wide realm which epistemology and ontology are its realm. The ethics that levinas defends it, is ethics which its realm is transcendence not immanence. He holds that western philosophy reduced other to same or self and it is in doing so antiethical.