From Dialogue to Performance
The History of a Philosophical Form
©2026
Monographs
XII,
136 Pages
Summary
“All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare tells us, “and all the men and women merely players.” But what does this mean, philosophically? Are all actors “merely” players, or do the best of them undergo a transformation in becoming something other than who they are? Are our own identities similarly slippery? Who is the real author of the play in which we find ourselves? To what degree does the very language we use control our thoughts and speech?
This book addresses these questions across strikingly different scenarios: ancient Greece, sixteenth-century Italy, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century France and Germany. In each case the contrast between linear and non-linear styles of reasoning is seen to be a major source of conflict, from the contentious exchanges in sixteenth-century Europe between the Church and the supporters of modern science, to the nineteenth-century shift in scholarship from straightforward analysis to hermeneutical interpretation, and to the crisis in twentieth-century thought forced by the need to think and feel as an embodied self beyond language. This work should find its target audience in advanced undergraduate and graduate philosophy students, and in an educated audience outside of academia.
This book addresses these questions across strikingly different scenarios: ancient Greece, sixteenth-century Italy, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century France and Germany. In each case the contrast between linear and non-linear styles of reasoning is seen to be a major source of conflict, from the contentious exchanges in sixteenth-century Europe between the Church and the supporters of modern science, to the nineteenth-century shift in scholarship from straightforward analysis to hermeneutical interpretation, and to the crisis in twentieth-century thought forced by the need to think and feel as an embodied self beyond language. This work should find its target audience in advanced undergraduate and graduate philosophy students, and in an educated audience outside of academia.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1 Socrates and Plato
- Socratic Dialogue
- Platonic Dialogue
- Chapter 2 Science and Religion in Dialogue
- Historical Consequences of a Power Imbalance
- Bruno’s Confrontations with the Church
- Galileo’s Dialogues on Science and Religion
- Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion
- Descartes’s Dialogues with the Church
- Chapter 3 Hermeneutics and the Return to Plato
- Schleiermacher and Dilthey
- Nietzsche’s Search Through Plato for a New Way of Life
- Hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer
- Other Readings of Plato
- Chapter 4 The Return to the Pre-Socratics
- Nietzsche and Heidegger in Search of Origins
- Chapter 5 Dialogical Style
- Nietzsche’s Dialogical Style
- Heidegger’s Creative Use of the Dialogical Form
- Chapter 6 Rational Dialogue
- Habermas on Rational Dialogue as Communicative Action
- Oakeshott on the Limitations of Rationality and Rationalism
- Rorty on Integrating Epistemology and Hermeneutics
- Bakhtin on Monologic and Dialogic
- Chapter 7 Dialogue and Spirituality
- Marcel’s Response to the Broken World
- Buber on Authentic and Inauthentic Dialogue
- Levinas and the Challenge of the Face of the Other
- Bohm on Spiritual Awakening through Dialogue
- Chapter 8 Embodiment and Performance
- Of the Body and on Performance in Nietzsche
- Heidegger on Embodiment
- Gendlin’s Focus on Felt Meaning
- Merleau-Ponty on Embodiment and Performance
- Performance and the Modern Theater: Deleuze, Derrida, Artaud, and Badiou
- Wittgenstein’s Philosophy as Performance
- Chapter 9 Concluding Remarks
- Bibliography
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects
Contents
Preface
In this book, I trace the historical development and usage of the dialogue form through analysis of key moments in the history of philosophy.
I begin with Plato, since his use of the dialogue form is widely recognized as the standard by which all others are measured. However, even though Plato was the author of these dialogues, it was his teacher Socrates who was the central character in most of them. He was often shown competing against sophists, who taught their students how to win arguments, while Socrates taught them to think for themselves through a form of interactive reasoning called dialectics. I then introduce Plato’s theory of ideas as an early form of metaphysical dualism, and indicate how overcoming it has been a perennial challenge for philosophers up to the present day.
Details
- Pages
- XII, 136
- Publication Year
- 2026
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783034356268
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783034356275
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783034356251
- DOI
- 10.3726/b23664
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2026 (July)
- Keywords
- thinking as thanking totalizers vs infinitizers fusion of horizons truth-disclosive potential in feeling theater of cruelty Socratic irony polyphonic author philosophy as performance non-conceptual mystery mooded experience minor theater monologic vs dialogic maieutic examination logos language game grammatical vs psychological interpretation hermeneutics hermeneutical circle Gelassenheit felt meaning face-to-face encounter event esoteric meaning chasm Body without organs authentic and inauthentic dialogue arete aporia
- Published
- New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2026. XII, 136 pp.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
