Philosophy As Dialogue

Hosle covers the development of the philosophical dialogue beginning with Plato to the late twentieth century, providing a taxonomy and doctrine of categories.

Philosophy, Dialogue, and Education is an advanced introduction to nine key European social philosophers: Martin Buber, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lev Vygotsky, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone Weil, Michael Oakeshott, and Jürgen Habermas. This detailed yet highly readable work positions the socio-political views of each philosopher within a European tradition of dialogical philosophy; and reflects on the continuing theoretical relevance of the work of each to education generally and to critical pedagogy. The discussion in each chapter is informed by materials drawn from various scholarly sources in English and is enriched by materials from other languages, particularly French, German, and Russian. This enhances the comparative European cultural perspective of the book; and connects the work of each philosopher to wider intellectual, political, and social debates. The book will appeal to academics, postgraduates, and researchers working in philosophy, philosophy of education, and in educational, cultural, and social studies more generally. Advanced undergraduate students would also benefit from the book’s discussion of primary sources and the authors’ suggestions for further reading.

The present book is no ordinary anthology, but rather a workroom in which anthropologists and philosophers initiate a dialogue on trust and hope, two important topics for both fields of study. The book combines work between scholars from different universities in the U.S. and Denmark. Thus, besides bringing the two disciplines in dialogue, it also cuts across differences in national contexts and academic style. The interdisciplinary efforts of the contributors demonstrate how such a collaboration can result in new and challenging ways of thinking about trust and hope. Reading the dialogues may, therefore, also inspire others to work in the productive intersection between anthropology and philosophy.

This volume of essays takes as its point of departure Martin Buber’s principle of dialogue, which he applied as a comprehensive hermeneutic method for the study of various cultural phenomena. The volume critically evaluates the methodological purchase to be gained by the introduction of Buber’s conception of dialogue in political theory, psychology and psychiatry, and religious studies.

During his long career, Hilary Putnam repeatedly revised his philosophical positions. This unique volume is a window into his intellectual humility and breadth of interests, as his own thinking evolved in dialogue with contemporaries such as Sellars, Habermas, Rorty, Chomsky, McDowell, Nussbaum, W. V. Quine, Cora Diamond, and Cornel West.

A. G. Long presents a new account of the importance of conversation in Plato's philosophy. He provides close studies of eight dialogues, including some of Plato's most famous works, and traces the emergence of internal dialogue or self-questioning as an alternative to the Socratic conversation from which Plato starts.

Dialectic and Dialogue seeks to define the method and the aims of Plato's dialectic in both the "inconclusive" dialogues and the dialogues that describe and practice a method of hypothesis. Departing from most treatments of Plato, Gonzalez argues that the philosophical knowledge at which dialectic aims is nonpropositional, practical, and reflexive. The result is a reassessment of how Plato understood the nature of philosophy.

In Plato's Apology, Socrates says he spent his life examining and questioning people on how best to live, while avowing that he himself knows nothing important. Elsewhere, however, for example in Plato's Republic, Plato's Socrates presents radical and grandiose theses. In this book Sandra Peterson offers a hypothesis which explains the puzzle of Socrates' two contrasting manners. She argues that the apparently confident doctrinal Socrates is in fact conducting the first step of an examination: by eliciting his interlocutors' reactions, his apparently doctrinal lectures reveal what his interlocutors believe is the best way to live. She tests her hypothesis by close reading of passages in the Theaetetus, Republic and Phaedo. Her provocative conclusion, that there is a single Socrates whose conception and practice of philosophy remain the same throughout the dialogues, will be of interest to a wide range of readers in ancient philosophy and classics.