What is the Philosophy of Dialogue? Historical Interaction of Different Schools

Abstract

To answer the question “what is the philosophy of dialogue” it is necessary to solve two interrelated tasks: to define the main group of its authors and to iden­tify the main part of its content. During the century of development of the phi­losophy of dialogue, several centers of its consolidation can be distinguished. The first most famous such center is the group of dialogists in Germany in the 1920s. It is with the ideas of Rosenzweig, Buber, Ebner, Rosenstock-Huessi that the philosophy of dialogue is associated in the first place. Along with this, it is necessary to consider the independent center of the philosophy of dialogue in Russia, which is primarily associated with the name of M.M. Bakhtin. The pres­ence of a philosophy of dialogue as a unified direction essentially depends on the extent to which these two schools can be considered as one entity. At the same time, many researchers note the presence of a common source for these centers in the philosophy of H. Cohen, which, although not considered by its author as a philosophy of dialogue, contained important prerequisites of the latter. These three centers of consolidation served as a source for a number of dialogical teachings, which more or less independently developed during the 20th century in Germany, France, the Soviet Union, the USA and Israel (H. Levin Gold­schmidt, E. Levinas, V.S. Bibler, etc.). In addition to the continental branch, at the end of the 20th century, the analytical-pragmatic movement of the philo­sophy of dialogue appeared in works of K.-O. Apel, J. Habermas, K. Lorenz, P. Lorenzen. All these authors are characterized by the view of reality as a process of interaction between persons, the priority of language in relation to thinking, the study of the deep connection of social processes with dynamics of interper­sonal relations. In this article, we consider the forms of comprehension of the listed topics in different schools of philosophy of dialogue in historical dy­namics. This allows us to talk about the philosophy of dialogue as a single move­ment of thought.