Before the Voice of Reason: Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-ponty's Ecology and Levinas's Ethics (SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought)

Before the Voice of Reason is a phenomenological critique of reason grounded in our experience of the voices that already address us and summon us prior to the emergence of the voice of reason. In part one, David Michael Kleinberg-Levin explores the voices of nature and draws on Merleau-Ponty s phenomenology to offer a new way of thinking about environmental responsibility. In part two, he looks at the voice of the moral law and the voices of other human beings, advances a more nuanced account of Levinas s distinction between Saying and Said, and proposes a new argument for our responsibility to the other."