Open AccessBeing and responsibility
Author(s) -
Savo Laušević
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
filozofija i društvo
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.116
H-Index - 1
eISSN - 2334-8577
pISSN - 0353-5738
DOI - 10.2298/fid0321087l
Subject(s) - ontology , epistemology , ethos , relation (database) , transcendence (philosophy) , consciousness , sociology , character (mathematics) , subject (documents) , perspective (graphical) , anthropocentrism , philosophy , environmental ethics , computer science , mathematics , linguistics , geometry , database , artificial intelligence , library science
Drawing on Levinas, the author seeks to explore the question of being and responsibility, as a relation between ontology and ethics, from the perspective of a meta-position that would enable a critique of the classical West European ontological tradition with its strongly cosmocentric, anthropocentric, and egocentric character. The main purpose of the paper is to examine whether there is in West European thought a possibility to found the ethics of responsibility on overcoming the ontology of being. More precisely, the author seeks to show that in contemporary Western philosophy the significance and validity of the classical ontological principle are declining when it gets separated from the ethos of philosophy itself. Moreover, a gradual shift from the impersonal being to the ontology of the personality takes place. This ontology of the personality is grounded in the Other. It withdraws from the game of consciousness which represents being. The personality thus understood, in Levinas' words, carries within itself vested responsibility, because in the personality there lie the infinite and transcendence