Hello and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast where your two favorite philosophy professors bring big ideas into everyday life.

I'm David Pena-Gusman. And I'm Ellie Anderson. As always, for an extended version of this episode,

community discussion, and more, subscribe to Overthink on Substack. Today we're doing one of our

closer look episodes where we dive deeply into a particular text. Today, that text is from a

philosopher that I spent a lot of my 20s working on, Emmanuel Levinas, and we are going to be

reading his essay on Escape, or we read it. We're going to be talking about it. If you want to read it,

we recommend it. This pairs well with it. We're also hoping that

it can be interesting, even if you're just a listener, because I have found that some of my

favorite podcasts involve people talking about books that I actually haven't read. But this is a short

essay that you can easily read. Well, I have worked on Levinaas a lot less than you, Ellie, but he has been really influential

for me in thinking about ethics and the relationship, specifically between phenomenology

and ethics.

And one thing that I cannot not point out is that I've been surprised to see Levina's pop up

sometimes in the most unexpected of places,

in contemporary philosophy, as a point of reference for thinking about ethics. So, for example,

Karen Barad, who is a feminist science studies scholar, has this whole theory about quantum mechanics

and physics, and at the end, connects that to levina's of all figures.

And so even though he is primarily concerned with questions of ethics, his philosophy is quite versatile and lends itself to appropriation from many different philosophical corners.

He's been extremely influential in recent decades in American and French philosophy and beyond.

And I think part of the reason that we wanted to do this episode is that we've actually found we haven't really talked about Levina us much on overthink.

I think his philosophy can be hard to integrate into other discussions of

...