Thinking About Thinking

Adriaan T. Peperzak holds the Arthur J. Schmitt Chair of Philosophy at Loyola University, Chicago. Among his books are Platonic Transformations: With and After Hegel, Heidegger, and Levinas; Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas; Modern Freedom; The Quest for Meaning: Friends of Wisdom from Plato to Levinas (Fordham); and Thinking: From Solitude to Dialogue and Contemplation (Fordham).

Rather than elaborate types, values, classics, or even a phenomenology of conversation, Peperzak draws the reader into an engaging dialogue to rediscover how thought and life can enrich each other. By reconfiguring an array of premodern, modern, and postmodern stances, he presents a mature evaluation of Levinas, human affectivity as an original dative of manifestation that cannot be mastered or exhausted by any conversation, and abundant untimely but eminently applicable wisdom on philosophy's mediating role in the university and in our culture. In the process we awake from dogmatic and anti-dogmatic slumbers to engage with equal fervor thought and one another. Both his wide circle of grateful readers and newcomers to Peperzak's oeuvre have much to learn from this stimulating collection.---—Peter Casarella, DePaul University "Thinking about Thinking comprises a set of meditations about the dialogical nature of philosophy and the philosophical life. The fruit of twenty-five years of teaching by a gifted and spirit-filled philosopher, these ten meditations gather around the themes of trust and faith in its several forms, including religious faith and Hegel's "faith in reason." As dialogical, philosophizing entails the receiver who is also a responder. Its focus is on the dative case, each participant bringing along the "tradition" that has helped fashion the person he or she is. In effect, it requires the risk that the honest conversation entered into by trusting interlocutors will leave neither party unchanged by the experience. Reading this thoughtful account is itself transformative. It is reminiscent of Foucault's famous "parrhesiastic contract."---—Thomas R. Flynn, Emory University