On Dialogue

Reviews / Votes

This wonderful book covers the phenomenon of dialogue from our everyday experience to the philosophical disourses as the manifestation of the uniqueness of each and every single individual. -- Agnes Heller, Professor Emeritus, New School for Social Research, New York Dialogue is a ubiquitous term in everyday experience and increasingly in recent philosophy. Combining diverse approaches from the history of philosophy, phenomenolongy and the insights of Mikhail Bakhtin, Dimitri Nikulin gives us a clear and illuminating account of dialogues as process, event, and interaction in the world. -- Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Political Science, Yale University, senior research fellow, Columbia Law School Since the Bakhtin Boom in the 1980s, 'dialogue' has been everywhere present as a word and too often absent as a disciplined philosophical relation. Nikulin provides the concept with a history, a psychology, and an inventory of its pitfalls, dead-ends, and challenges. But he does more. In devising his own bridge categories to help us flourish in dialogue, he sheds light on its most confounding paradoxes: how I can owe my being to dialogue and yet recognizably cohere and persist over time; and how I am at any moment complete, but at no time finalized. An erudite and inspiring book. -- Caryl Emerson, Princeton University