In Chapter 6, we build on the analysis from the previous chapter by focusing specifically on negotiations and dialogue. We examine a few Islamist groups in Mali and Syria, highlighting how their transnational or local orientation influences conflict resolution. In Mali, we analyze variations between groups: Ansar Dine, Katiba Macina, and Al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). While they all share a radical Islamist ideology, Ansar Dine and Katiba Macina – both with strong local roots and a focus on Mali – have occasionally shown interest in negotiating with the Malian government. The government, in turn, has also been open to negotiations with them at times. In contrast, no such attempts have been made with AQIM, which has an explicitly transnational agenda. In Syria, we trace the development of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and focus on variations over time. Initially one of the most extreme Islamist actors in the Syrian civil war, HTS has gradually demonstrated respect for ceasefires and a willingness to explore dialogue. We demonstrate how these openings for conflict resolution are preceded and driven by localization.

This chapter is interested in the politics of publication and how it shapes what writers are likely to publish. But the chapter is also interested in the role publishers have in promoting a public culture and establishing a genealogy of writing – in this instance a genealogy of African writing in ways that the Heinemann African Writers series has done. tblished his first novel, Weep Not, Child (1964), under the editorship of the then series editor, Chinua Achebe, and would soon follow it with the publication of The River Between (1965). He was part of that inaugural moment and the consolidation of the African Writers Series, in 1962. Ngugi in his collection of essays, In the Name of the Mother, celebrates Heinemann African Writers series for its role in creating what is truly a ‘Pan-African common literary inheritance’ and for ‘enabling a dialogue among readers and writers from the three main colonial traditions: Portuguese, French and English’, and in addition, enabling dialogue between Africans of the continent and the diaspora.

This chapter challenges the claim that the first decade of the nineteenth century was a disciplinary moment in which the arts and sciences were separated. It analyzes a publishing phenomenon of that decade: scientific publications for children, women, and artisans produced as conversations, dialogues, or catechisms. A wealth of such publications emerged in the years 1800 to 1810. They offer important insights into the competing scientific cultures of the turn of the century, in which professionalized disciplinarity had by no means eclipsed the amateur, even un disciplined, natural philosophy of the late eighteenth century. This essay focuses on Jeremiah Joyce, a scientific educator and author, analyzing the development of his educational writings and those of his interlocutors in this decade. Though these years produce new models of scientific instruction, experiment, and print communication, there are strong continuities with the natural philosophical and pedagogical practices of the previous century.

This chapter investigates the architecture of belonging by examining how built environments can foster genuine emotional connection and a sense of place. Drawing insights from a Melbourne-based panel hosted by Six Degrees Architects, it explores how planners, developers, and architects can design precincts that nurture a profound sense of belonging. Emphasising the importance of emotional wellbeing and ecological sustainability, the discussion integrates Indigenous perspectives on place and custodianship, contrasting them with human-centric Western planning practices. Case studies, including Melbourne’s Public Office precinct, Canberra’s Dairy Road, and Hobart’s In the Hanging Garden precinct, illustrate creative strategies for revitalising urban spaces through adaptive reuse, community engagement, and landscape-led design. The chapter underscores the need to prioritise values of Country in architectural and urban-planning processes, advocating systemic change in procurement and planning practices, fostering authentic engagement, and promoting reconciliation through the collaborative stewardship of the built environment.

In conversation with Peters’s Law as Performance, I suggest paying closer attention to dialogue as one central element of performance itself. In this contribution, I analyze the configuration of affective spaces based on the characteristics of dialogue in legal settings, from legislation to inquisitorial cases.

The term post-truth refers to circumstances in which objective facts exert less influence on public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. While not new, this phenomenon has intensified with the rapid speed that misinformation and conspiracy theories can spread online, compounded by rising political polarization. This book draws on leading research in psychology and other social sciences to explain how post-truth claims emerge, why they persist despite contrary evidence, and how we might respond to their challenges. My analysis integrates three distinct approaches to human reasoning: Bayesian models, dual-process theories, and social argumentation. I introduce the term wise deliberative spaces to describe forums that pursue truth and the common good through discourse practices that foster deliberative dialogue. These spaces have declined in recent decades due to reduced face-to-face community engagement, shifts in the media landscape, declining trust in knowledge-producing institutions, and deepening political divides. The chapter concludes by summarizing the book’s organization.

Criminal punishment captured the imagination. It was a violent process, staged deliberately by the state to demonstrate certain truths about state power. However, these public scenes were susceptible to rewriting by provincial subjects. These subjects fixated on state attempts to define truth by means of judicial violence. Subjects insisted that violence be conditioned on its respect for provincial logos - rational discussions about the nature of any particular act of state violence. They emphasized that the courtroom (rather than the archive) was the most important locus for determining the content of laws and the boundaries of state power and insisted that the courtroom be a space not just for punishment, but communication. Most prolific on this point are early Christian writings about martyrs, which emphasized what they claimed was the Roman state’s incapacity to rationally defend the persecution of Christians. It is found among Jews and pagans as well.

This chapter takes up a series of popular folktales about radical inequality (Aesop, Gevia ben Psisa/ben Qosem) to argue that provincial communities become increasingly interested in reframing quotidian interactions as legal interactions. Legal dialogue came to be imagined as a register of discourse capable of controlling powerful people. Interestingly, however, all of these stories feature a protagonist somehow marked as physically deformed or otherwise grotesque: Aesop was the ugliest slave imaginable, Geviah a hunchback. The very bizarreness of these characters offers a standing challenge to normative understandings of power: in each case, it is the most degraded members of society who manage to wield legal logos to control their superiors, society’s notional elites.

Chapter 2 presents the theoretical approach of the book. Images are conceptualized as cultural artefacts that are both signs open for meaning making and tools open for social action. They are also dialogical and political artefacts that take part in knowledge production and circulation.

Chapter 2 examines three problems in Heidegger’s interpretations of Plato: the impasse of dialogue and dialectic, Heidegger’s disastrous and putatively Platonic politics, and the reductive approach to Plato’s metaphysics. First, I question his critique of Platonic dialectic by showing that it is already built into the matter as well as the way of writing in Plato’s texts. Second, I show that Heidegger’s ontologizing of political themes in Plato’s writings leads him to a catastrophic “ontological politics” wherein ethics and politics in their concrete sense are completely eclipsed by or absorbed into ontology. Third, I show that the interpretations that Heidegger offers to show that Plato allegedly occluded the original sense of truth and distorted the question of Being. A closer look at the relevant passages as well as other passages that Heidegger overlooked reveals a much more dynamic ontology than what Heidegger sees in Platonism understood as metaphysics. The concluding remarks of the chapter sketch the post-Heideggerian directions leading from these three problems to the Platonism of Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger.

Chapter 4 deals with the philosophical meaning of dialogue as a form of writing and thinking. I take as my starting point the apparent paradox of Plato’s written critique of writing in the Phaedrus and explain how Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger resolve this question. For all three of them (inspired by Friedländer on this point), dialogical writing overcomes the deficiencies inherent to writing. I argue that for all three of them, dialogical writing and dialogical thinking reflect the practical embeddedness of philosophical inquiry: for Strauss, it is the political situatedness of the philosopher that has priority; for Gadamer, it is our ethical facticity; for Krüger, it is the fundamental attunements (Stimmungen) of philosophy. The chapter also explains how these three trajectories propose three different interpretations of the meaning of Socratic and Platonic irony, which is a key feature of Plato’s dialogical compositions.

Chapter 3 is a short interlude. It deals with the novelty of Paul Friedländer’s philological approach to Plato’s dialogues and shows how his insights were decisive in the subsequent philosophical attempts to move beyond Heidegger’s attack against Platonism. Friedländer’s originality consists of a brilliant attempt to bridge the philosophical and literary dimensions of Plato’s writings and thus to propose an interpretation of the philosophical meaning of the dialogical form of philosophy. I show that the three key features found by Friedländer – anti-dogmatism, irony, and ineffability – all have a significant role to play in post-Heideggerian Platonism, but that these had to be further developed philosophically by Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger.

Abstract: In this chapter, English examines Human Nature and Conduct (1922) through the lens of Dewey’s broader theory of how humans learn. The chapter shows how Dewey’s emphasis on the productive role of uncertainty in human learning processes relates to how he differentiates between a habit as “a vital art” and a habit as “a mechanical routine.” The chapter then examines how Dewey expands his critique of traditional education by showing how traditional schooling separates habits from thought, creating mechanistic habits that do not allow for young people to learn the habit of learning – the habit to grow through encounters with difference. Using an example of classroom dialogue, English discusses how classrooms can become educational environments that foster the types of habits associated with educative growth. The chapter concludes by emphasizing that Human Nature and Conduct offers insight into not only the education of young people but also the education of grown-ups. Accordingly, adult society must construct environments for themselves that nurture thought and thereby help them develop rich perceptions of interdependencies between humans. Ultimately, the chapter provides an understanding of why making learning a habit is essential for the growth of an equitable, democratic future of education and society.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which maskilic (Jewish enlightenment) authors reshaped elements of the Hebrew language in order to make it suitable for use as a vehicle of modern European-style literature. Maskilic authors were motivated by the principle that the creation of a Hebrew literary canon based on European-language models was an essential component of the Jews’ Enlightenment. They developed a wide range of new written genres which had not previously existed in Hebrew, including original and translated novels, short stories, novellas, anecdotes, feuilletons, and plays; a flourishing press; popular science (e.g., astronomy, physics, biology, chemistry, zoology), politics, geography, and history; and fiction and nonfiction works for young readers. This large-scale endeavor resulted in the emergence of numerous linguistic innovations. In this chapter we examine several key yet understudied innovative features of maskilic Hebrew: 1) realistic colloquial dialogue, including a) new punctuation norms, b) use of interjections, and c) forms of address; 2) discussions of contemporary scientific and political topics using newly developed Hebrew vocabulary and European loanwords; and 3) prose syntax based on German and Russian stylistic models. These new components of Hebrew paved the way for the later vernacularization of the language in Ottoman Palestine.