Learning from the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis, and Ethical Possibilities in Education (Suny Series, Second Thoughts)

How does ethics influence the myriad ways we engage difference within educational settings?

Learning from the Other presents a philosophical investigation into the ethical possibilities of education, especially social justice education. In this original treatment, Sharon Todd rethinks the ethical basis of responsibility as emerging out of the everyday and complex ways we engage difference within educational settings. She works through the implications of the productive tension between the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and that of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Judith Butler, Cornelius Castoriadis, and others. Challenging the idea that knowledge about the other is the answer to questions of responsibility, she proposes that responsibility is rooted instead in a learning from the other. The author focuses on empathy, love, guilt, and listening to highlight the complex nature of learning from difference and to probe where the conditions for ethical possibility might lie.

"This book contains many original insights into the ethical character of the educational relationship. Although there is a tradition of this kind of theorizing in continental educational philosophy, it is quite unique—and quite needed—in the English-speaking world. Todd displays an excellent command of the complex material that she uses to develop her argumentation and presents an excellent balance between theoretical and philosophical argumentation on the one hand, and practical issues on the other." — Gert J.J. Biesta, coeditor of Derrida and Education