Emmanuel Levinas's life spans the twentieth century. He was born in 1906 and lived his youth in Kovno in Lithuania; he died in 1995 in Paris. Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and the great tradition of nineteenth-century Russian literature inspired him to philosophy. In France, his study of philosophy, his career as a Jewish educator and intellectual, and his philosophical teaching and writing were all conducted within the traditions of French and German philosophy, especially the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and others such as Jean Wahl. Living in Europe also meant living in the years that led to the Nazi dictatorship and included the horrors of the Nazi atrocities. These events and their aftermath, years of trying to cope with the memories of those horrors, also mark his thinking. His commitment to the French liberal tradition was always powerful, his relationship to Marxism changing and mixed. If Levinas is our teacher, it is because he was a student of, indeed a child of, the twentieth century.

There are four features of Levinas's life and thought that will help us to appreciate his significance: his historical situation, especially the role of the Holocaust in his memory and in his thought; his relationship to Judaism and religious texts, in particular the Bible and the Talmud; his place among those who were critical of Western philosophy and yet found special links to that tradition; and finally, his role in the twentieth-century debates about the place of ethics in our lives and the foundations of ethical value.