Dialectic and Dialogue

"Dialectic and Dialogue is a very important work, potentially a classic. It is stimulating throughout, as well as original in conception and execution---the first study to bring together these two signal concepts."---Mark Roche, University of Notre Dame

"This book is one of the most interesting, intelligent, and engaging discussions of dialogue and dialectic in recent decades. While it returns us to certain practices of ancient philosophy, it can be seen paradoxically as serving the contemporary continuation of philosophy as a meaningful mode of engaged mindfulness."---William Desmond, Catholic University of LelNen

"In this beautifully written and erudite book, Dmitri Nikulin brings philosophy to life in a double sense. He shows how the method of dialectic originates in the open-ended practice of dialogue, and he engages us in a lively dialogue with thinkers of the past, both ancient and modern. Nikulin's narrative is full of original insights and surprises, such as a defense of the philosophical dignity of interruption (for which many of us have long been waiting)."---Rainer Forst, Goethe University, Frankfurt

This book considers the emergence of dialectic out of the spirit of dialogue and traces a historical and systematic relation between the two. It draws on the works of ancient Greeks, as well as on the writings of Cusanus, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Gadamer, to argue that philosophical dialectic, which from its very inception is central to philosophy, emerges out of the seemingly haphazard practices of oral dialogical exchange. The philosophical history of dialectical methods and procedures moves from Plato through modern philosophy, where dialectic becomes the driving force behind the constitution of a rational philosophical system. Conceived as a logical enterprise, dialectic strives to liberate itself from dialogue, which it views as merely accidental and even disruptive of thought, in order to become a systematic or scientific method. Modern dialectic thus becomes a genuine expression of the Cartesian autonomous and universal yet utterly monological and solitary subject. Such a subject requires not dialogue but dialectic alone to reason correctly. Yet dialogue, despite its unfinalizable and interruptive nature, remains meaningful and complete. Indeed, it is what constitutes the human condition, because individual being, which cannot be described by dialectic, can only be realized through dialogue.