Ethical and Epistemological Aspects of 'Dialogue': Exploring the Potential of the Second-Person Perspective

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Religion is devoted to ‘dialogue’—a trans-disciplinary key concept par excellence that is not to be used as a strategy to produce some ultimate synthesis, but rather to foster a conversation (Mendes-Flohr 2015). ‘Dialogue’ is crucial for any interreligious, intercultural and interhuman endeavor, because it includes the art of listening and chances for self-correction, promotes mutual enrichment and provides a novel way of approaching the questions, not only of foreign cultures and our familiar life worlds, but also of God. Despite its inflationary use in different disciplines, the notion of ‘dialogue’ remains far from clear. The purpose of this Special Issue is to investigate ‘dialogue’ in a multi-approach analysis, combining an array of traditions, including existential philosophy, the philosophy of dialogue, politics, hermeneutics, and phenomenology.

Philosophers of dialogue are often accused of focusing primarily on the ethical-existential significance of the encounter with another person—one’s being transformed by the embodied co-presence, voice and testimony of another—while neglecting the cognitive content of the truth claims put forward. Yet, if we ignore that which is unique to dialogue, namely the performative, unforeseeable and surprising character of address and response in a shared space of reflection (Buber 1923; Rosenzweig 1925; Meir 2018), we also miss the insights that we can gain from this interactive process—for instance, a productive allosensus, which, unlike consensus and dissensus, “allows one to recognize the difference of and from the other” (Nikulin and Nikulin 2010, 79). In this way, one can become enabled to build bridges between cultures and develop an inter-cultural and inter-religious epistemology: in order to understand the other, one needs to be cognizant of the prism of one’s own interpretative lens (Mendes-Flohr 2007).

Another important insight for ‘dialogue’ is the second-person perspective. Second-person encounters exceed what one person alone or what a neutral observer can see and compare; it differs fundamentally from both the insider perspective of the first person and the outsider perspective of the third person. Self-expression and the impression of otherness come together in the mutually binding sphere ‘in-between’ the interlocutors of the dialogue (Welz 2015). The interplay of opposed orientations, where one’s own beliefs are challenged by alternatives, may result in scientific virtues such as ‘intellectual pluri-perspectivity’ and ‘epistemic humility’ (Fisch 2016), which help us avoid one-sidedness and oversimplification. This is why the potential of the second-person perspective is a promising approach to facilitating a better understanding of interhuman dialogue and, thus, worth being explored further in regard to methodological innovation (Tracy 1990; Darwall 2006; Del Mar 2012; Schmidt-Leukel 2020).

Topics which might be covered include: 

• The dialogical relation in oral and written conversations
• Reason and language
• Questions of truth and (limits of) knowledge about ‘the transcendent’
• The polyphony or plurivocity of dialogue
• Prayer and the significance of the ‘vocative’ in the God relationship
• The quality and status that can be attributed to the ‘in-between’ that mediates the dialogical relation between self and the other
• The art of listening as connected with the philosophy of dialogue
• The way in which affective and intellectual dimensions of ‘dialogue’ are conjoined
• The relationship between epistemology and ethics in dialogue

References

• Buber, Martin (1923/1996), I and Thou, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Touchstone.
• Fisch, Menachem (2016), “A Modest Proposal: Toward a Religious Politics of Epistemic Humility” in: Idem,The Rationality of Religious Dispute, ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes, Leiden: Brill, 49-71.
• Meir, Ephraim (2018), “Dialogical Theology Moored in Buber’s Dialogical Philosophy” in: Zeitschrift für christlich-jüdische Begegnung im Kontext, 1-2: Martin Buber. Neue Interpretationen, 76-84.
• Mendes-Flohr, Paul (2007), “Martin Buber: A Builder of Bridges” in: Jewish Studies Quarterly 14
• Mendes-Flohr, Paul (ed.) (2015), Dialogue as a Trans-Disciplinary Concept: Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Dialogue and its Contemporary Reception, Berlin/Munich/Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
• Nikulin, Dmitri & Nikulin, D.V. (2010), Dialectic and Dialogue, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
• Rosenzweig, Franz (1925/2000), “The New Thinking” in: Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. and trans. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company 2000, 109-139.
• Schmidt-Leukel, Perry (2020), “The Relevance of Interreligious Dialogue in the Public Sphere. Some Misgivings” in: Religious Diversity and Interreligious Dialogue, ed. Anna Körs, Wolfram Weiße, and Jean-Paul Willaime, Cham: Springer Switzerland, 259-264.
• Tracy, David (1990), Dialogue With the Other: The Inter-Religious Dialogue, Louvain: Peeters Publishers.
• Welz, Claudia (2015), “In-Between Subjectivity and Alterity: Philosophy of Dialogue and Theology of Love” in: Dynamics of Difference: Christianity and Difference, ed. Ulrich Schmiedel and James M. Matarazzo, Jr., London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 125-134.

Prof. Dr. Claudia Welz
Prof. Dr. Christian Wiese
Dr. Bjarke Mørkøre Stigel Hansen
Guest Editors

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