Bracha L. Ettinger · CC BY-SA 2.5

A French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish descent, Levinas argued that ethics, not metaphysics, is the true starting point of philosophy — that the encounter with another person's face carries an obligation prior to any system of thought. That claim, worked out across decades within phenomenology and existentialism, became one of the most influential reorientations of twentieth-century European philosophy, reshaping how later thinkers approached questions of responsibility and otherness.