The Ethical Dimension of Teaching - Based on a Main Theme in Emmanuel Levinas' Totality and Infinity
2011
Dansk
The article discusses the relationship between ethics and teaching in one of the most important works in 20th century philosophy, Emmanuel Levinas' Totality and Infinity. The discussion draws on a pedagogical understanding which Levinas considers to be opposed to his own ethical understanding of teaching, Socratic maieutics. A more thoroughgoing interpretation of the two "positions" will show that they have more in common than what the opposition seems to elucidate at first. The sublation of the two will make it possible to sketch out a third ethical point of view, more applicable to teaching in practice than either of the two taken on their own.