الغيرية الأنثروبولوجية : تهافت في المنهج و إبهام في نظرية المعرفة

Abstract EN

In his philosophy on otherness, Emmanuel Levinas (1906- 1995) stirred many questions connected once again to traditional philosophical concerns: the search for knowledge based on the centrality of the self.

The knowledge generated by the self, through the abstraction process performed by theoretical reason, worries a group of humanist philosophers due to the fact that the absolute and comprehensive character enjoyed by the philosophy of mind carries in its depths the capacity to produce exclusivist, eliminatory or classifying limits upon the other.

Meanwhile, Levinas and new humanist philosophers and proponents of otherness believe that the exit from the circle of the self to the circle of the other and the production of a participatory knowledge render the acceptance of the epistemological products of the other and the self easier as they are not products of the transcendent self.

It might initially seem that this epistemological concern of Levinas deals with the problem of exclusion established by most philosophies and even domains of knowledge emanating from the transcendence of the self (human or non-human self), but there are methodological and epistemological obstacles which demonstrate that the knowledge provided by the contemporary philosophy of otherness is a knowledge with an ambiguous direction, even at the level of the instruments of knowledge.

It is necessary to approach the topic of otherness from a philosophical, anthropological, and even ethnographic viewpoint, and to search for points of convergence between them.

The need is intensifying for a humanist trend with mental philosophical fundamentals and a humanist structure which takes the serious implications of philosophies on the reality of human life and the individual’s relationship with himself and with others into consideration.