Abstract
Emmanuel Lévinas challenges the understanding of contemporary medical ethics from the position of introducing alterity and metaphysics as the source of ethics. This contradicts the concept of ethics as a set of principles based on the ideal of autonomous and sovereign self as practiced in secularized society ? ethics derived from Politics.
This article analyzes some of the paradoxes of contemporary medicine based on modern science with the ideal of objectivity(denying uniqueness, reducing the other to the same) and therefore denying or annihilating subjectivity (the space of dialogue with the other), and the attempts to establish ontology as foundation of medical ethics, ethics derived from science. for Lévinas, both science and Politics belong to the sphere of Totality, which can never be based of ethics that belong to the sphere of infinity.Analysis of medicine as stemming from tradition of care and tradition of knowledge offers alternative framework for understanding medicine and medical ethics and