Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch

This timely volume provides the best and most expansive investigation of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s thought available in English. He was an author who always felt that he would be born posthumously. This book goes a long way to making that prediction a reality. -- Alexandre Lefebvre, University of Sydney
This work masterfully treats many of Jankélévitch’s important concepts and arguments, including the possibility of forgiveness, remorse, love, humility, virtue, the almost-nothing, and the je-ne-sais-quoi. The work carried out in this volume will pave the way for further study and engaged discussion of Jankélévitch’s timely, singular, and creative philosophy. -- Antonio Calcagno, King's University College at Western University
A necessary and challenging work, La Caze and Zolkos’ collection renews attention not only on Jankélévitch as a key French philosopher who wrote `for the twenty-first century,’ but also on France’s subsequent `moral development’ after the Holocaust. The essays move beyond their philosophical foci to suggest that the political and ethical elements of Jankélévitch’s thought in relation to modernity, fraught as it is with the reemergence of fascism, race hatred, and Anti-Semitism, are intimately tied to conclusions Jankélévitch drew from his Holocaust experience. La Caze and Zolkos present Jankélévitch’s work as a case study on how to shift the valence of `forgiveness’ to account for the `homelessness’ of the Jewish philosopher, on how to link the philosophical to the ethical. -- Kitty Millet, San Francisco State University
A beloved professor at the Sorbonne, well-known in the musical and intellectual circles of his time, Vladimir Jankélévitch nonetheless felt himself to be an outsider to twentieth-century French philosophy. This collection makes the case that he is uniquely a philosopher for our times. With important essays that span the wide range of Jankélévitch’s writings on remorse, forgiveness, love, death, music, metaphysics, and ethics, this volume will reward readers new to his philosophy and sharpen our sense of the philosophical and artistic legacy of a truly original thinker. -- Diane Perpich, Clemson University