Week 10 - Uncut Funk - Robert

In my undergraduate work, I accidentally took a graduate philosophy class over Plato’s Theaetetus—a dialogue that examines the nature of knowing. The entire, semester-long course was dedicated to a line-by-line examination of the text to understand Plato’s theory of knowledge.

As I was reading Uncut Funk, I experienced nostalgia for that Plato course. Hall and hooks discuss the pedagogy and method of conversation early on in the dialogue, and I found profound connections between their dialogue and Plato’s philosophical dialogues. What I remember most from the course was the intellectual pleasure we got as a class in uncovering truth and understanding in our close reading. Uncut Funk deserves such an analysis, and I can envision graduate seminars of the future taking a line-by-line approach to hooks and Hall.

My question/s focus/es on the method of dialogue and public discourse as pedagogy:

1) In what public spaces (if any) do meaningful dialogues like this happen outside of Universities? Politicians and pundits would probably like to believe they have meaningful discourse, but they don’t.

2) How does technology expand or limit the possibilities of sitting down to tea and discussing the ins and outs of experience and philosophy? Has there or will there ever be a technological alternative to sitting down for a conversation that captures all of the subtleties and nuance of in-person dialogue? My gut says no.

3) What role does “good old-fashioned” dialogue have for the future of public discourse and pedagogy?

I ask these questions somewhat ironically, considering in Plato’s day, Socrates lamented the use of writing as an inferior form of human dialogue and intellectual exploration, and Plato turned around and wrote his words down; although, there is considerable debate about the faithfulness of Plato’s Socratic dialogues. The scientific and intellectual achievements of the past couple of millennia seem to debunk Socrates’s fear, but conversations have not disappeared from spaces where intellectual achievement happens. Perhaps, I am simply a curmudgeon, holding on to physical conversation as a final vestige of our digital evolution.