Cultural Interlocutors
While I have been inspired by the ideas of prominent philosophers, psychologists, philologists, artists, and poets—Vladimir Bibler, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lev Vygotsky, Josef Brodsky, Osip Mandelshtam, Diego Rivera, Thomas Jefferson, etc.—I have rarely quoted any of them directly. This is intentional—I just wrote as I understood the subject matter of the book, and thus I take all responsibility for it. I also want this book to be readable and understandable not for philosophers only, but for everyone. I think that it is necessary because it is nearly impossible to find a person unaffected by
copyright or patent-related turmoil nowadays. However, if some bits of the book seem too philosophical, you can skip them at the first reading and come back later.
I am compelled to pay particular tribute to the first thinker on my list, Vladimir Bibler, a Russian philosopher of Jewish descent who felt that ancient Greece was his cultural motherland. I was lucky to communicate with him for years. Vladimir Bibler developed a vision of the culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, “The Dialogue of Cultures.” The Dialogue of Cultures is interrelated to “Dialogics,” the logic of thinking and communication, and “Paradox-logic,” the logic of the transmutation of ideas. A special application of this triad to education gave birth to the concept of the “School of The Dialogue of Cultures.” Vladimir Bibler passed away in 2002. He left books and articles, written and published in Russian, which are not that easy to understand but are impossible not to accept. I believe Vladimir Bibler is one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and of humankind. His ideas were what mostly guided my quest.
