Russell Johnson
Assistant Instructional Professor, Associate Director, Undergraduate Religious Studies Program and Core Sequence, UChicago Divinity School
“Why Write a Philosophical Dialogue?” book chapters from Opposites Attract (forthcoming)
Thursday, November 6th, 5:00 PM, Swift Hall, Room 207
The workshop will consist of a brief introduction followed by discussion. We will focus on pre-circulated book chapters, which can be accessed here.
Abstract
This is a draft of the opening chapters of a forthcoming book on dialogue and dialectic, followed by an outline of some later chapters. The audience for the book is undergraduate students who are taking a course in philosophy, communication studies, rhetoric, or theology. At present, I am not aware of any accessible primers on dialectic for that readership, so this book is being written to invite novices into the dialogical tradition. I welcome any input you have, but I would especially solicit comments and questions about the definitions I offer of dialectic and the thirty reasons I provide for why someone would write a philosophical dialogue. Are there other dialogues I should engage with, or other affordances of the genre I neglected? Does the connection between political polarization and philosophical dialogue make intuitive sense? What else needs to be said to help students not feel disoriented when they encounter the term “dialectic” in the wild?
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The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinators Halley Haruta (haruta@uchicago.edu) or Yeti Kang (hkang01@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.