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Overview
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.