Levinas and hermeneutics on ethics and the Other

A number of prominent theoretical psychologists employ the ideas of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to address what they take to be a harmful scientism and serious ethical blind spots in modern psychology. We argue that while Levinas's approach no doubt incorporates a powerful and invaluable turn to ethics, it seems cryptic, limited, and one-sided in some important respects. We illustrate some of the ways these limitations show up in theoretical psychology critiques and suggest that philosophical hermeneutics and the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin present a fuller and more balanced picture of human agency without diluting the crucial insights conveyed by Levinas's insistence on "ethics as first philosophy.".