Doing philosophy with others

"Doing Philosophy with Others portrays philosophy as a communicative endeavor energized by dialogical transactions in which the involved parties strive for an understanding of the meaning of their corporate existence. Doing philosophy is presented as an ongoing adventure that is done with others, opening avenues for demonstrating, explaining, interpreting, describing, depicting, and showing, as these are enabled by way of a language that sets the horizons of limits and possibilities on what can be thought and said." "As suggested by the book's title, conversation, reminiscence, and reflection are entwined activities and processes. Reminiscence and reflection are understood as the twin halves of dialogic encounters that stimulate the embodied conversational economy. Concrete illustrations of these encounters are provided in the conversations of the author with some of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, including Karl Jaspers, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, Paul Tillich, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricoeuer. These varied conversations, some going back over fifty years, take the form of interviews, joint presentations, epistolary transactions, and casual exchanges of ideas. It is within the thick and density of these conversations that the author is self-presented as seeking his own voice in concert with the voice of the other."

"The recollections and reminiscences on the selected conversations are followed by an extended postscript that consolidates the results of the varied exchanges and underscores the importance of conversing, reminiscing, and reflecting in our wider cultural existence. The postscript addresses issues pertaining to the role of narrative in the praxis-oriented lifeworld of everyday engagements, the struggle for multicultural understanding, the challenges of conversing across the assorted disciplines represented in the present day university, communication as constitutive of knowledge and self-identity, and the requirement for a transvaluation of the political."--Jacket.