Opening

Within the history of philosophy the question of the other while not having a purely singular determination appears nonetheless to be a uniquely human concern. Hence engagement with the nature of alterity and thus the quality of the other are philosophical projects that commence with an assumed if often implicit anthropocentrism. Alterity figures therefore within a context that is delimited from the start by an assumption about the being of being human, or at least the approach to human being usually begins with the posited centrality of human-to-human relations. This position is explicit in the writings of Levinas for whom the presence of the other is acknowledged and sustained through a mode of address. He argues that:

There is therefore a primacy of relation between humans that is given through the ‘word’. If it were possible to define the absence of the ‘word’ then that absence would describe the animal's presence. Absence or ‘poverty’ would prevail. It is, of course, precisely this prevailing sense of deprivation that, as has already been argued, leaves open the possibility of thinking a form of animal presence that was situated beyond both a founding without relation though equally beyond an attempt to supplant it.