This course will explore the thought of two major twentieth-century thinkers: the towering German figure in European phenomenology, Martin Heidegger, and his French Jewish follower, interlocutor, and ultimately critic, Emmanuel Levinas. The first part of the course will focus on Heidegger's most important work, Being and Time, assessing his contribution to continental thought through a consideration of his adaptation of ontology and his treatment of a set of major concepts, e.g., Being, the everyday, care, temporality, and death. The second part of the course will turn to Levinas, a student of both Husserl and Heidegger, who sought to translate the phenomenological method of his teachers into a French idiom. In so doing, he thoroughly reworked it, increasingly distancing himself from what he saw as the anonymity of Husserl's Ego or Heidegger's Being and substituting for them a concern with encounter, with intersubjectivity, with the other, with the face-to-face. The principal questions this part of the course will ask are: how, if at all, does Levinas go further than Heidegger? Is Levinas right that the ethical moment is essentially absent from Being and Time? What role does sexual difference play in Levinas's contribution? And finally, how do his Jewish writings relate to his project as a whole, and especially his dialogue with Heidegger? Readings will include major works and essays from both thinkers. Requirements: attendance and participation, several short writings assignments, final paper. Prerequisites: at least one class in philosophy or religious thought. Enrollment limit: 20 (expected: 15).