Genocide and the totalizing philosopher

a Levinasian analysis

Leonard Grob

pp. 130-138

in: John K. Roth (ed), Genocide and human rights, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Abstract

In the face of the Socratic charge to examine the nature of all that is, the failure of philosophers to pay little more than passing attention to genocide should give us pause. Although a number of contemporary thinkers have begun to attend to that evil, and although a few, such as Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, had done so much earlier than most, philosophers have usually gone about their business as if the genocidal events that bloodied the twentieth century, and still loom large in the twenty-first, simply had not occurred.¹ How are we to account for this glaring omission in philosophy's history?

Cited authors

Levinas Emmanuel

Arendt Hannah

Adorno Theodor