Martin Buber's Dialogical Thought as a Philosophy of Action

This book promotes a philosophical revival of Buber’s dialogical thought by repositioning it as a philosophy of action, departing from a long-established consensus that narrowly viewed it as a post-Kantian epistemology. Based on careful analysis of his writings, the book’s main thrust is to reconstruct Buber’s argument that dialogue is the perfected form of action, and a perfect action is necessarily dialogical. This reconstruction renders Buber's dialogical thought pertinent to contemporary analytic philosophy by situating it within central discussions in the field of philosophy of action.

1: Rekindling Buber: From Philosophical Eclipse to Potential Revival, An Introduction.- 2: The Centrality of Action in Buber’s Dialogical Thought.- 3: Chaos, Abyss and Whirl: Ambivalence as the Seedbed of Action.- 4: From Above and the Deep: Decision as the First Phase of Action.- 5: “With one’s whole being”: ‘Unity’ in I and Thou.- 6: ‘Unity’ as a Dimension of Action in 'Images of Good and Evil' and Concurrent Essays.- 7: The Café Encounter: Unraveling the Unity-Dialogue Nexus.- 8: Beyond Anscombe and Davidson: A Buberian Contribution to Contemporary Philosophy of Action, Conclusion and Coda.

Dr. Asaf Ziderman, a scholar of Modern Jewish thought, earned his PhD from Tel Aviv University's School of Philosophy in 2019. His current research focuses on a philosophical analysis of intimacy, meaning, identity, and belonging within 20th-century Jewish thought.