Ethics as First Philosophy

I pose and answer a problem arising from my reading of the French-Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. The problem is that the philosophical tradition, according to Levinas, has made it impossible to encounter the other person in her otherness—that is, without getting myself implicated in, or entangled with, her appearance to me. The solution comes from the discovery of the Infinite in Descartes's Third Meditation, where Levinas finds the formal structure with which to think of a non-reductive relation between otherness and sameness.