This article explores two central notions of ‘dialectics’ and ‘dialogics’ based on the work of Vygotsky and Bakhtin respectively, as well their varying interanimations within Stalin-Marxist Russian societyIt is proposed that these two positions are incommensurably located alongside one another in contemporary education. I argue that Bakhtin offers diametrically oppositional educational provocations to those of Vygotsky.The implications of these interpretations will be explored with consideration of their underlying philosophical incompatibilities and contradictions, as well as the opportunities such a consideration pose (...) for educational practice today. (shrink)

Michail Bakhtin’s philosophy of act is considered as a metaphysical project. Bakhtin’s conception is explored in a wider context of the metaphysical project of Russian existentialism. Interpretations of the term “truth”, which correspond to different versions of existentialism, are compared. Shestov’s existentialist particularism, Berdiaev’s actualistic personalism, Bakhtin’s ethical existentialism are analysed. Existentialist implications of Gregory Palama’s metaphysics of light are considered.

Dialogue is a seminal concept within the work of the Brazilian adult education theorist, Paulo Freire, and the Russian literary critic and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin. While there are commonalities in their understanding of dialogue, they differ in their treatment of dialectic. This paper addresses commonalities and dissonances within a Bakhtin-Freire dialogue on the notions of dialogue and dialectic. It then teases out some of the implications for education theory and practice in relation to two South African contexts of learning that (...) facilitate the access to education of disadvantaged groups, one in higher education and the other in early childhood education. (shrink)

Mikhail Bakhtin aimed to invent a phenomenology of the self-experience and of the experience of the other in his early work. In order to realize such a phenomenology he combined different approaches he called idealism and materialism / naturalism. The first one he linked to Edmund Husserl, but did hardly name him directly concerning his phenomenology. Does this intersubjective phenomenology give a hint that Bakhtin used Husserlian ideas more than considered yet? Or did they both invent similar ideas independently from (...) each other? Both thinkers dealt with the issue of intersubjectivity. Husserl judged statements on other psycho-physical realities as metaphysics in the Logical Investigations II, but in his Ideas I he described the others as enhancing one’s experience through their “experiential surpluses”. In the same way Bakhtin described the unique perspective of the other as a mandatory and valuable part of the world of the act in his Philosophy of the Act and his investigations on Author and Hero. In order to understand the influence of Husserl’s phenomenology for Bakhtin’s early philosophy we need to take a look closer at those contentual parallels as well as some paraphrases yet unnoticed. This gives hint for the question if for Bakhtin Husserl was more than just a name dropped. In this article I reconstructed the relations between both thinkers and answered the question if the dating of Bakhtin’s early work until 1928 has to be re-considered. (shrink)

This article theorises the process of adapting my research on intercultural communication for public performance in collaboration with a theatre company. I frame the collaboration as taking place within a hospitable institutional space, and then consider what it means to enact hospitality interpersonally, given Derrida's understanding that the condition of its possibility is at the same time the condition of its impossibility. I suggest that the enactment of hospitality can be understood through the application of an intercultural theoretical framework based (...) on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of outsideness, and that this framework can be applied to both the collaboration with the theatre company and to the purposes of public engagement with research. I conclude with a consideration of the relationship between hospitality and hope, and a call to move towards a ‘condition of possibility’ for working as academics, for public engagement, and for living. (shrink)