Andrew Nash: The Dialectical Tradition in South Africa Routledge, London, 2009

reviewed by Christopher Allsobrook, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

We provincial South African philosophers, trapped in second-hand, neo-Kantian antinomies, tend to discriminate just two basic senses of the abused and beleaguered term, ‘dialectic’: the first associated, respectfully, with a dialogical method of Ancient philosophy; the second, pejoratively, with muddled transgression of the principle of non-contradiction in Continental philosophy. Dialectical thinking is held unreflectively to stand in contrast to analytical thinking; the insertion of such a term in philosophical discussion confirms suspicion that a line of argument has run astray, if not to the point of opinionated assertion, then, to senseless confusion occasioned by impassioned failure to draw sufficiently clear and precise distinctions. In the dominant English-speaking philosophical environment, right-minded philosophers sensibly avoid the dialectic. It is in response to this crisis that The Dialectical Tradition in South Africa recalls and attempts to revive a dormant tradition of dialectical critical thinking that has long animated a dissident sector of predominantly Afrikaans-speaking philosophers in this country.