By proposing the Microcosm and Macrocosm analogy for dialogue between Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology, the authors of this volume are reviving the perennial positioning of the human condition in the play of forces within and without the human being. This theme has run from Plato through the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Modernity, and has been ignored by contemporaries. It now acquires a new pertinence and striking significance due to the scientific discoveries into the "infinitely small" in life, on the one hand, and the prodigious technological discoveries of the "infinitely great" on the other. Both open up undreamt-of prospects for the continuing conquest of cosmic forces. The human person – thrown into turmoil by the new approaches to life and needing to acquire new habits of mind, having lost security of all beliefs – desperately seeks a new clarification of the Human Condition within the unity of everything-there-is, of cosmic forces, and of his destiny. The dialogue between Islamic Philosophy and phenomenology of life can show the way. Papers by: Gholam-Reza A'awani, Mehdi Aminrazavi, Roza Davari Ardakani, Mohammad Azadpur, Gary Backhaus, Marina Banchetti-Robino, William Chittick, Seyed Mostafa Muhaghghegh Damad, Golamhossein Ebrahimi Dinani, Nader El-Bizri, Kathleen Haney, Salahaddin Khalilov, Sayyid Mohammad Khamenei, Mahmoud Khatami, Mieczyslaw Pawel Migon, Nikolay Milkov, Sachiko Murata, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Daniela Verducci.

Dialectic and Dialogue seeks to define the method and the aims of Plato's dialectic in both the "inconclusive" dialogues and the dialogues that describe and practice a method of hypothesis. Departing from most treatments of Plato, Gonzalez argues that the philosophical knowledge at which dialectic aims is nonpropositional, practical, and reflexive. The result is a reassessment of how Plato understood the nature of philosophy.

The original work presents a totally new methodology for understanding the concept of aesthetic experience through the medium of 'dialogue' - a dialogue between the subject and object; I and thou.

Presents results from a qualitative approach to the psychological study of everyday human experiences.

Phenomenology in the United States is in a state of ferment and change. Not all the changes are happy ones, however, for some of the most prominent philosophers of the first generation of phenomenologists have died: in 1959 Alfred Schutz, and within the past two years John \Vild, Dorion Cairns, and Aron Gur witsch. These thinkers, though often confronting a hostile intel lectual climate, were nevertheless persistent and profoundly influential-through their own works, and through their students. The two sources associated with their names, The Graduate Faculty of The New School for Social Research, and the circle around John Wild first at Harvard and later at Northwestern and Yale, produced a sizable portion of the now second gener ation American phenomenological philosophers. In a way, it was the very hostility of the American philo sophical milieu which became an important factor in the ferment now taking place. Although the older, first generation phenome nologists were deeply conversant with other philosophical move ments here and abroad, their efforts at meaningful dialogue were largely ignored. Determined not to remain isolated from the dominant currents of Anglo-American philosophy in par ticular, the second generation opened the way to a dialogue with analytic philosophers, especially through the efforts of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, led by 2 INTRODUCTION such men as James M. Edie and Hubert Dreyfus and, in other respects, Herbert Spiegelberg and Maurice Natanson.

Cumming also shows that conversion is not merely a personal predisposition of Sartre's--further manifest in his later conversions to Heidegger and to a version of Marxism. Conversion is also philosophical preoccupation, illustrated by the "conversion to the imaginary" whereby Sartre explains how he himself, as well as Genet and Flaubert, became writers. Finally, Cumming details how Husserl's phenomenological method contributed both to the shaping of Sartre's style as a literary writer and to his theory of style.