Description: This essay in metaphilosophy aims at showing that philosophy is indeed a conversation by clarifying many, if not all, features that determine the philosophical practice as provocative, responsive, dialogical, communitarian, educational, and transformative. Since philosophical thought is also rooted in a dimension of faith, this basic relation is made explicit and concretized through analyses of a particular form of interaction between faith and philosophy.
Brief description: Adriaan T. Peperzak holds the Arthur J. Schmitt Chair of Philosophy at Loyola University, Chicago. Among his books are Platonic Transformations: With and After Hegel, Heidegger, and Levinas; Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas; Modern Freedom; The Quest for Meaning: Friends of Wisdom from Plato to Levinas (Fordham); and Thinking: From Solitude to Dialogue and Contemplation (Fordham).
Review Quotes: Rather than elaborate types, values, classics, or even a phenomenology of conversation, Peperzak draws the reader into an engaging dialogue to rediscover how thought and life can enrich each other. By reconfiguring an array of premodern, modern, and postmodern stances, he presents a mature evaluation of Levinas, human affectivity as an original dative of manifestation that cannot be mastered or exhausted by any conversation, and abundant untimely but eminently applicable wisdom on philosophy's mediating role in the university and in our culture. In the process we awake from dogmatic and anti-dogmatic slumbers to engage with equal fervor thought and one another. Both his wide circle of grateful readers and newcomers to Peperzak's oeuvre have much to learn from this stimulating collection.-----Peter Casarella, DePaul University