In 2007 Cambridge University Press published my book Discovering Levinas. In that work I sought to accomplish two tasks: to provide an overall interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy and to do so by placing Levinas in conversation with the so-called analytic tradition in contemporary Western philosophy. The virtue of the method I used is that it aimed at presenting Levinas in as clear a vocabulary as possible. I tried to explain Levinas's philosophical terminology and to translate his arcane, obscure style into language that could be understood by readers familiar with Anglo-American philosophy and with other developments in modern religious and philosophical thought. At the same time, my first and foremost task was to make a case for reading Levinas in a certain way; I presented a Levinas whose claims about ethics could be appreciated as deep and radical but not incompatible with our ordinary lives – in particular, our moral, political, and religious lives.

When Discovering Levinas was about to be published in paperback, the editors at Cambridge suggested that I abridge and revise that book with an eye to introducing Levinas to readers and students who wanted a clear and helpful initial guide to understanding his thinking. The present book is the outcome of that effort. Each of its eight chapters is grounded in that earlier work, but in every case I have made significant modifications in order to streamline the interpretation, to eliminate much of the use of analytic philosophy that would have required special background, and to focus on central texts and themes.