Authentic human life is the open-ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to head, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium. ( (...) class='Hi'>Bahktin, 1984, p. 283)... (shrink)

Mikhail Bakhtin, and the writers associated with him, are of great importance to the traditions of literary theory and criticism. In particular, his concept of locating utterances in a "dialogical" situation has contributed immensely to theories of linguistics, language, and literature, and philosophy. In Bakhtin Thought , Simon Dentith provides a lucid and approachable introduction to the work of Bahktin and his circle, taking the reader helpfully through the many areas of their thought. Dentith indicates the points of contention, (...) difficulty, and importance. The book not only draws together together the often disparately collected writing of Bakhtin, but also that of Voloshinov and Medvedev, language theorists of commensurable importance as well. (shrink)

Debates over postmodernism, analyses of knowledge and power, and the recurring issue of Heidegger's Nazism have all deepened questions about the relation between philosophy and the social roles of intellectuals. Against such postmodernist rejections of philosophical theory as mounted by Rorty and Lyotard, Richard Peterson argues that precisely reflection on rationality, in appropriate social terms, is needed to confront urgent political issues about intellectuals. After presenting a conception of intellectual mediation set within the modern division of labor, he offers an (...) account of postmodern politics within which postmodern arguments against critical reflection are themselves treated socially and politically. Engaging thinkers as diverse as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Habermas, Foucault, and Bahktin, Peterson argues that a democratic conception and practice of philosophy is inseparable from democracy generally. His arguments about modern philosophy are tied to claims about the relation between liberalism and epistemology, and these in turn inform an account of impasses confronting contemporary politics. Historical arguments about the connections between postmodernist thought and practice are illustrated by discussions of the postmodernist dimensions of recent politics. (shrink)