A sabedoria da carne no itinerário de Emmanuel Lévinas

Abstract

Our research develops the genealogy of the body and of incarnation in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, retracing the author’s philosophical path through the major works of his youth and maturity, as well as those written in captivity. His path is marked by the philosophical categories of Creation, Revelation, Redemption. As Levinas dialogues with the authors of the phenomenological turn of philosophy, especially with Husserl and Heidegger, the intention here is to show, in an intrigue, his closeness and distanciation in relation to his masters and his inversion of the love of Wisdom, typical of the Western World, into a Wisdom of the flesh, that surges with the coming of the Other. The guiding principle of the Wisdom of the flesh is the body that remains as a creatural body given to the goodness of the world, which welcomes the revelation of the Other and gives itself away to the Other as a Good beyond the Being, to that Other exposed to useless suffering. After that, the debate over the Wisdom of the flesh will be revived with the embodied thinking of the French philosophers, Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry. This, in order to highlight how the body is apprehended in accordance with the meaning of the carnality of the Other’s humanism when confronted to other ways of experiencing the body, in contemporaneity.

Date of Award	8 Apr 2014
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	José Henrique Silveira de Brito (Supervisor)