Knowledge of the Other

In contrast to philosophy prior to Nietzsche, the phenomenological tradition has taken the event rather than substance as the fulcrum for philosophical understanding. Following Heidegger, this has meant focusing on temporality. Emmanuel Levinas argues that temporality is constituted in relation with another person, i.e., in ethics. Levinas' understanding allows us to see knowledge differently, as objective knowledge, on the one hand, and as welcome of the other person, on the other. The latter makes the former possible; indeed, it requires it. Jean-Luc Marion helps us understand temporality by discussing it as affectivity. Taken together, Levinas and Marion show that we cannot avoid giving objective accounts in the sciences and that those accounts must continually be recast. However, because human beings are not only temporal but temporalizing, the objective accounts in psychology must, in principle, be different than the those of other sciences. They must be hermeneutic.