Abstract

This book is a collection of superbly crafted essays on some fundamental texts of modern and contemporary philosophy. All were first published elsewhere in French. The translation here is accurate and graceful. Typically the author comments on works in which one philosopher engages in dialogue with another: Hegel with Hobbes, Hegel and Heidegger with Kant, Heidegger with Husserl, Merleau-Ponty with Husserl. After reconstructing the historical context and the issues relevant for an understanding of each text, Taminiaux selects points of comparison, suggests remarkably fresh interpretations, and artfully leads the reader to reformulate and rethink basic questions. These confrontations highlight the strengths as well as the blind spots of each thinker. There are no refutations or definitive conclusions; the tone is always exploratory rather than polemical. The goal of the book's dialectical method is not to achieve final clarity, but to be faithful to the richness, complexity, and inexhaustible depth of philosophical problems. Taminiaux is resolutely committed to the notion that acceptance of finitude should be construed not as an unfortunate constraint, but rather as a positive precondition of a thinking attuned to the showing-hiding structure of being. Philosophy must abandon the project of mathesis, for the dream of detached objectivity is incompatible with the circularity incumbent upon a thinking that finds itself always preceded by pre-theoretical experience. The task of understanding the relationships between organism and milieu, existence and consciousness, nature and spirit requires a perpetual recasting of questions from multiple points of departure. This interpretation of dialectic rejoins the original meaning of dialegein: to welcome the difference.