Emmanuel Lévinas.

Philosopher. Through his early education, Emmanuel Lévinas was thoroughly steeped in Russian culture and Jewish orthodoxy. He read, in Russian, the great novelists Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevski, and Leo Tolstoy, and the Bible in Hebrew. In 1923, Lévinas left Lithuania (a few intermittent years, including the revolutions of 1917, had been spent with his family in the Ukraine) for Strasbourg, where he began his general university education in psychology, sociology, Latin, and philosophy. Among the important philosophical influences at this time were the canon of philosophers Plato, Aristotle, René Descartes, and Immanuel Kant. Especially important, however, for Lévinas was the work of philosopher Henri Bergson, in particular his work on time as duration and as a release from static “scientific time.”