Levinas was born in 1906 in Lithuania, however, after going through the 1917 Russian revolution he traveled to France where he spent most of his life while traveling back and forth to Germany to pursue his studies with Husserl and Heidegger.  Levinas died in 1995. 

He was made famous by Sartre who said that he had learned phenomenology by reading Levinas.  Levinas was particularly struck by Heidegger's early phenomenology of Being and Time (that he summarized in his paraphrase Martin Heidegger and Ontology). 

Levinas was profoundly influenced by Heidegger.  Like Heidegger, he emphasized the importance of time for human understanding.  He said that "time" is the profound relationship that humans have with God.  It involves an understanding and appreciation of the limited time of our lives. 

Levinas had two major texts in which he outlined his own philosophy, Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974).  Central to this work is his study of man's relation to the Other.  Our relation to the Other is the foundation, he said, of our developing subjectivity.  He explains that the ethical requirement that we are responsible to or for the Other unsettles subjectivity.  So, whereas Heidegger thought of death in terms of "my death", for Levinas death is always the Other's death.  And our consciousness is determined by the way in which we are haunted by the Other's death and the possibility of that death.

Major Levinas texts: