Context
Conversations between two or more people have historically been a key mechanism for the generation of inquiry, leading to enlightenment across many fields of human endeavour. Etymologically, meaning literally ‘flows through’ discussion and debate of this kind. In both Greco-Roman and Indian classical traditions instruction, persuasion and entertainment were accomplished through dialogue. From Sumerian dialogues and disputations, Rigvedic dialogue chants and the epic Mahabharata to the Socratic dialogues of Plato, Cicero’s De Oratore and De Re Publica, and key works of the early Christian tradition, our ways of thinking and learning have been shaped by exchanges characterized by reciprocity and openness of style and mind.
In a number of areas of human inquiry – epistemological, ontological, historical, ethical, pedagogical, political – the dialogue experienced a revival in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fénelon’s Dialogues des morts (Dialogues of the Dead, 1712), Malebranche’s Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688), and Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) all helped to shape the resurgence of the form in different areas of inquiry. Edinburgh’s residents entered fully into the formal and informal possibilities of dialogue: it was here, for example, that the sociability of David Hume, Adam Smith and their compatriots in the Scottish Enlightenment became a defining feature of social and intellectual progress. Their work and that of their successors in Europe’s Enlightenments continues to inform our understanding of individual, social and political life in the twenty-first century. Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), for example – a work considered so inflammatory that its author wished it to be published only after his death – continues to delight and instruct its readers. The Institute draws on the distinguished history of interdisciplinary discussion and publication associated both with the University and with the city of Edinburgh. Much of our current interdisciplinary research in the humanities advances through the lively exchange of ideas, and formal and informal conversations in which views are formed, evidence is tested, and conclusions are modified. At their best, these conversations become dialogues.
Dialogue allows the present to confront the past, East and West to converse, dyads and binaries of all kinds to come into communication. Practised in philosophical, literary, religious, historical and political contexts, as a genre it offers an important heuristic for interdisciplinary study in its own right.
Description
This IASH research theme will address all aspects of dialogue in its Enlightenment contexts: close study of key examples of the form; toleration, moderation and radicalism in the form and practice of dialogic exchange; the dialogues of Enlightenment with its ‘others’; pedagogy and pleasure. We shall also be concerned with such issues as
- Dialogues between forms: words and music, text and performance, art and instruction
- Dialogues between languages, and between nations; their limit-points and breakdowns
- Socratic, scholastic, egalitarian, or other: dialogue as form and content
- the emergence of character through dialogue
- ‘alternative conversations’: the dialogues, for example, between centres of sociability and established institutions during the Enlightenment
- Communication and its failures; obstacles to dialogue: confrontation, power and fear
- Modern and contemporary theories of dialogue as tools of explication and enlightenment: Buber, Bakhtin, Friere
Fellowships
Applications for Fellowships in relation to any aspect of this theme are invited from researchers in any field of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.