Abstract

This essay aims to provide an answer to the problem concerning the possibility to build a pattern of philosophical ethics 'other', that is seriously different from the one which goes from Kant up to Edmund Husserl. The book by Emmanuel Lévinas "Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence", 1978, is the main object and the principal field of our analysis. We want to understand if, and how, a shape of the way of being of what we call 'ethics' can be constructed with the goal to give raise to an "other ethics", which should contain the theoretical place of birth of the responsibility for the Other. A deep interruption of the continuity of the history of the philosophy of ethics would be the consequence of the "other ethics". The well known essay by Jacques Derrida on Lévinas and Edmund Husserl's lessons on ethics are important to determinate the peculiar features of Lévinas' ethics within the common phenomenological horizon.