Mention 20th-century French philosophy and chances are you’ll hear names such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, or Jacques Derrida. Imagine the surprise, then, that Talmud-trained, French-speaking, Lithuanian-born Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95) could posthumously catapult into the top ranks of French thinkers. Levinas is gaining attention in the scholarly world, and conferences are proliferating worldwide this year, which is the centennial of his birth.

Who is this philosophical Johnnycome-lately?

“In many ways,” wrote New School professor Simon Critchley, “it now looks as if Levinas were the hidden king of 20th-century French philosophy … In my view, Levinas is the most important postwar philosopher in the continental tradition. He is the antidote to Heidegger.”

University of Vermont philosophy professor Richard Sugarman explains it this way: “Levinas effected a Copernican turn in philosophy by beginning with the other rather than the self – that is, ethics as the basis for political life, theory of knowledge, and Jewish thought.”

Levinas’ main idea, adds Princeton doctoral candidate Marcelline Block, “is that one must respect the Other and treat him better than oneself, with no vested self-interest.” In the old days, she said, there was the golden rule of hospitality, but it had been forgotten “particularly in the post-Freudian era” where it was “acceptable to love only in conservation of oneself and in search of oneself.””In Levinas’s ethics,” she said, “the ego always comes after that of the Other. It is refreshingly enlightening.”

That “ethics and responsibility – and not self-preservation – are the fundamental motivators in man’s life” is counterintuitive, said independent scholar Michael Maidan. Levinas, he said, managed to reverse the traditional relationship between practical and theoretical reason.

Levinas’s views have been popularly described as “ethics over ontology [the study of being].” As Duquesne University professor Marie Baird elaborated, Levinas attempted to “overthrow ontology as philosophy and replace it with ethical responsibility.”

Mr. Critchley said Levinas’s basic message was deceptively simple: “At the core of morality there is an ethical relation to the other, a relation which places me under an infinite demand and makes me infinitely responsible to the other human being.”

Johns Hopkins University philosophy professor Hent de Vries said the Levinasian view of ethics is that of a relation which survives only in acts of “small goodness” and his conception of ethics is the one that an entire generation of postwar philosophers has taken up as a starting point or formidable challenge including Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Marion, Hilary Putnam, and Stanley Cavell, said Mr. De Vries.

In a famous passage, Levinas described a dog named Bobby whom he and other Jewish war prisoners encountered in a German labor camp during World War II. The dog would bark and jump up and down at the end of the day: For the dog, “there was no doubt that we were men.”

In his 20s, Levinas studied at the University of Freiburg and helped pioneer the introduction of works by Husserl and Heidegger, his former teachers, into France. He later led the Ecole Normale Orientale of the Alliance Israelite Universelle and taught at the Sorbonne.

According to “Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics” (Fordham University Press), by philosopher of religion Edith Wyschogrod, Levinas attempted “to ac complish a radical reversal of traditional procedures by grounding metaphysics in ethics rather than in constructing an ethic upon pre-established metaphysical foundations.”

This emphasis on responsibility and ethics has found a receptive audience in a world shaken in the wake of genocide, ethnic bloodshed, war, and the Holocaust. Indeed, Levinas’s philosophy has much to do with World War II. He was taken as a prisoner of war, and his family died in the Holocaust. The effects of the war on his thinking were profound.

Levinas’s work has been applied to an astonishing range of areas of inquiry, from Dutch scholar Joachim Duyndam’s study of suicide bombers to Saint Louis University philosophy professor Michael Barber’s research into Levinas and Latin American liberation theology. The list goes on from Zen to anthropology to nursing.

Purdue University graduate students and faculty founded the North American Levinas Society, which last month held its inaugural conference – about a week after the Levinas Ethical Legacy Foundation and the Center for Jewish History held a well-attended lecture in New York by Bernard-Henri Levy. Also in May was a conference in London on Levinas and cinema. Whether it was Levinas and business ethics at University of Leicester, or Levinas and medical ethics at Boston University, interest is building.

A parallel case perhaps where interest in a European thinker has grown steadily over two or three decades is German theorist Walter Benjamin, a protean figure who, though once not well known in academia, today has become a virtual cottage industry in cultural studies.

In 2002 and 2006, international conferences on Levinas were held in Israel. In the past, Levinas didn’t seem to catch on there, perhaps because he could not be easily categorized: To secular philosophy faculty, he was a philosopher who gave talks on the Talmud; but to Orthodox scholars, he remained a strange import, steeped in German phenomenology. In short, he remained an exile among exiles, at least until now.

Correction: The consulate generals of France and Israel, New York University, and several organizations focusing on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy co-sponsored a lecture on Levinas by Bernard-Henri Levy. An article on page 19 of the June 2-4 Sun incorrectly listed the sponsors.