TY - BOOK AU - Steven L. Bindeman PY - 2026 CY - New York, United States of America PB - Peter Lang Verlag SN - 9783034356268 TI - From Dialogue to Performance T2 - The History of a Philosophical Form DO - 10.3726/b23664 UR - https://www.peterlang.com/document/1688220 N2 - “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. KW - 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 LA - English ER -