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>> RICHARD BERNSTEIN: I dedicated that book to Hannah Arendt, who was not living at that
time. Jurgen Habermas. Hans Georg Gadamer and Richard Rorty.
I think the philosophical significance can be put on several different levels.
The first was this that look, in this book, the normal way of looking at philosophy very
frequently is in terms of very distinct schools or approaches which are considered different
and sometimes even hostile to each other.
Thus, for example, there had been a big dispute and a famous dispute between Habermas and
Gadamer, sometimes called the Habermas-Gadamer controversy.
There's been a lot of disagreement and dispute between Habermas and Rorty.
And for many people there would be the attitude that these four figures are completely antithetical.
They have nothing to do with each other and anything they would have to do with each other
would be mainly critical.
I did not see it that way.
I saw that there were tremendously significant overlapping themes.
I don't want to underestimate differences, but everybody stresses differences. I wanted
to bring out the kinds of continuity and that had a systematic significance for me because
I was trying to argue that there are ways in which you could look upon what was taking
place at that time and I think it continues to take place is a kind of shift in our understanding
of dialogue and rationality and that you could look upon these as different kinds of voices
that I was attempting to weave together.
So at that, you might say, it's immediate philosophical point.
There are other ways in which it is relevant.
I do take friendship very seriously and I think it's an old theme in philosophy and
it has a great philosophical significance.
If I had to characterize a style, my own style in philosophy, it very frequently is an attempt
to really listen to what other people are saying and to extract what I take to be sort
of right and the truth in it and to be critical where I think there are limitations.
So I frequently get a lot of praise about how when I write about people I write about
them so sympathetically. But I think that's a way of really getting
The reason I do that is not just because I want to be a cipher but because I want to
try and hear their voice. What it is they're trying to say and it seems to me that that's
really sort of integral to the nature of real friendship.
So I'm happy to say that on a personal level these people were friends but there?s a kind
of intellectual dimension to this which I think sometimes goes against the grain of
some of the stylized modes of doing professional philosophy today.
What I mean by that is here.
Rorty's characterized it a little but I've done it myself.
That really what became the style of analytic philosophy is an adversarial style, to argue
it like a lawyer.
If you say something my task is really to find the holes in it, to try and make you
look like an idiot.
But there's another style which I call the hermeneutical style which is, you know, I
might learn something from you, so what do I think you're trying to say?
Now you can't do that without trust, without a certain amount of imagination and without
a certain amount of generosity in terms of it and those are important in friendship.
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