Martin Buber's Dialogical Thought as a Philosophy of Action: Martin Buber’s Dialogical Thought as a Philosophy of Action

This book promotes a philosophical revival of Buber’s dialogical thought by repositioning it as a philosophy of action, departing from a long-established consensus that narrowly viewed it as a post-Kantian epistemology. Based on careful analysis of his writings, the book’s main thrust is to reconstruct Buber’s argument that dialogue is the perfected form of action, and a perfect action is necessarily dialogical. This reconstruction renders Buber's dialogical thought pertinent to contemporary analytic philosophy by situating it within central discussions in the field of philosophy of action. Preface Acknowledgments Contents List of Abbreviations 1: Rekindling Buber: From Philosophical Eclipse to Potential Revival, an Introduction (1) The Demise of Buber’s Dialogical Philosophy (2) Dialogical Thought as Epistemology (3) Reconstructing Dialogical Thought as a Philosophy of Action (4) Book Structure (5) A Note on Terminology 2: The Centrality of Action in Buber’s Dialogical Thought (1) Dialogue and Action in IAT (2) Dialogue and Action in Later Writings (3) Dialogue as Action in Its Perfected Form (4) Method and Structure 3: Chaos, Abyss, and Whirl: Ambivalence as the Seedbed of Action (1) Encountering the Swirling Chaos Ambivalence and Destabilization Negative and Positive Ambivalence (2) Buber’s Metaphors of Ambivalence (3) Sequential and Simultaneous Ambivalence 4: From Above and the Deep: Decision as the First Phase of Action Introduction (1) Decision and Action (2) Pseudo and True Decisions (3) The Voice from Above: Revelation (4) The Voice of Conscience (5) The Revelation-Conscience Interplay (6) The Problem of Ultimate Decisions Conclusion 5: “With one’s whole being”: ‘Unity’ in I and Thou Introduction (1) Unification and Concentration (2) Unification and Decision (3) Unification and the “Whole Being” 6: ‘Unity’ as a Dimension of Action in ‘Images of Good and Evil’ and Concurrent Essays Introduction (1) The Mirroring Dynamics of Unification-Fragmentation and Direction-Arbitrariness (2) Unification as the Fusion of Kraft (3) A Layered Ontology of Personhood (4) The Dialogue-Unity Linkage in Concurrent Essays 7: The Café Encounter: Unraveling the Unity-Dialogue Nexus (1) A Thought Experiment (2) Exclusivity (3) Reflection (4) 8: Beyond Anscombe and Davidson: A Buberian Contribution to Contemporary Philosophy of Action, Conclusion and Coda (1) Situating Buber in the Field of Philosophy of Action (2) Actions and Their Effects Davidson: Actions as Confined to Bodily Movements Anscombe: Doing What Happens Buber: Action as a Dialogical Transaction (3) Actions and Events Davidson: Actions as a Subclass of Events Anscombe: Action as a Sui-generis Category Buber: Event as a Deficiency of Action (4) Causality, Power, and Personhood Davidson’s Causal Determinism Anscombe’s Power of Agency Buber: Action as Essentially Personal (5) Philosophy of Action and the Uniqueness of the Essentially Human Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Index