This important book brings together in one volume a collection of illuminating encounters with some of the most important philosophers of our age-by one of its most incisive and innovative critics.
For more than twenty years, Richard Kearney has been in conversation with leading philosophers, literary theorists, anthropologists, and religious scholars. His gift is eliciting memorably clear statements about their work from thinkers whose writings can often be challenging in their complexity.
Here, he brings together twenty-one originally published extraordinary conversations-his 1984 collection Dialogues: The Phenomenological Heritage, his 1992 Visions of Europe: Conversations on the Legacy and Future of Europe, and his 1995 States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers. Featured interviewees include Stanislas Breton, Umberto Eco, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Herbert Marcus, George Steiner, Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Franois Lyotard. To this classic core, he adds recent interviews, previously unpublished, with Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, and George DumŽzil, as well as six colloquies about his own work.
Wide-ranging and accessible, these interviews provide a fascinating guide to the ideas, concerns, and personalities of thinkers who have shaped modern intellec-tual life. This book will be an essential point of entry for students, teachers, scholars, and anyone seeking to understand contemporary culture.
Contents
Preface
Part One: Recent Debates
Jacques Derrida: Terror, Religion, and the New Politics
Jean-Luc Marion: The Hermeneutics of Revelation
Paul Ricœur: (a) On Life Stories (b) On The Crisis of Authority
(c) The Power of the Possible (d) Imagination, Testimony, and Trust
Georges Dumézil: Myth, Ideology, Sovereignty
Part Two: From Dialogues: The Phenomenological Heritage, 1984
Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics of the Infinite
Herbert Marcuse: The Philosophy of Art and Politics
Paul Ricœur: (a) The Creativity of Language (b) Myth as the Bearer of Possible Worlds
Stanislas Breton: Being, God, and the Poetics of Relation
Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction and the Other
Part Three: From States of Mind, 1995
Julia Kristeva: Strangers to Ourselves: The Hope of the Singular
Hans Georg Gadamer: Text Matters
Jean-François Lyotard: What Is Just?
George Steiner: Culture-The Price You Pay
Paul Ricœur: Universality and the Power of Difference
Umberto Eco: Chaosmos: The Return to the Middle Ages
Part Four: Colloquies with Richard Kearney
Villanova Colloquy: Against Omnipotence
Athens Colloquy: Between Selves and Others
Halifax Colloquy: Between Being and God
Stony Brook Colloquy: Confronting Imagination
Boston Colloquy: Theorizing the Gift
Dublin Colloquy: Thinking Is Dangerous
Appendix: Philosophy as Dialogue
