Somehow philosophy has a nasty habit of wandering off into esoteric hair splitting. I guess most every discipline does that. Maybe it bothers me more with philosophy because it's philosophy that struggles with the fundamental issues, giving us the tools to evaluate the results of the more particular hair-splittings of the other disciplines.

I have really seen, though, since Sept 11, 2001, that philosophical inquiry has been in retreat, taking a back seat, or practically bound and tossed into the trunk, while one wild eyed ideologue or another is at the wheel, off on some desperate mission to save the world. Shoot first and ask question later.

Dallmayr addresses this shift, and really that's the whole point of the book. Maybe before 9/11 we could indulge in hair splitting without too much guilt. Now though we really need to be sincerely questioning without any such self-indulgent partisanship. Somehow we have to pry the icy fingers of the ideologues from their death grip on the steering wheel. Dallmayr does a great job here of opening up a series of deep questions to a wide audience. He does a nice job of avoiding dry technical analysis where the connection to a living heart beat is lost, but also avoiding a simplistic one-sidedness that leaves no room for questioning to breath. The inquiry here trembles with life.

The general strategy here is to open up a question, first laying out some preliminary stakes in the ground, the coarse alternative approaches. Then Dallmayr starts to open up some of the intermediate space, some of the nuances. It's like a flower blossoming. Each chapter left me intrigued and feeling equipped to carry the inquiry futher. Every issue discussed is vital.

While Dallmayr does a fine job of introducing these issues to a wide audience and equipping the reader to carry on further... he doesn't really address a serious stumbling block, that so few people are motivated to engage these topics beyond the shouting of slogans. Perhaps he has found a high sort of wisdom where one is generous in sending out invitations and then happy to carry on the conversation with a very small crowd. I have heard splendid jazz where I was the sole person in the audience. The musicians didn't disdain my listening! Still, I wonder. With the world at stake, and it's hardly just Dallmayr inviting us to cultivate an intelligent concern... do we really need

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj5qgfQj-co ( )