The specific focus of Martin Buber and the Human Sciences is “dialogue” as the foundation of and integrating factor in the human sciences, using dialogue in the special sense which Buber has made famous: mutuality, presentness, openness, meeting the other in his or her uniqueness and not just as a content for one’s own thought categories, and knowing as deriving in the first instance from mutual contact rather than knowledge of a subject about an object. By the “human sciences” the authors/editors mean material that can be meaningfully approached in a dialogic way, hence, the humanities, education, psychology, speech communication, anthropology, history, sociology, and economics. The essays in Martin Buber and the Human Sciences demonstrate that thirty years after Buber’s death his influence is still resonating in many countries and in many fields.

When Michael Dukakis accused George H. W. Bush of being the "Joe Isuzu of American Politics" during the 1988 presidential campaign, he asserted in a particularly American tenor the near-ancient idea that lying and politics (and perhaps advertising, too) are inseparable, or at least intertwined. Our response to this phenomenon, writes the renowned intellectual historian Martin Jay, tends to vacillate often impotently between moral outrage and amoral realism. In The Virtues of Mendacity, Jay resolves to avoid this conventional framing of the debate over lying and politics by examining what has been said in support of, and opposition to, political lying from Plato and St. Augustine to Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Jay proceeds to show that each philosopher s argument corresponds to a particular conception of the political realm, which decisively shapes his or her attitude toward political mendacity. He then applies this insight to a variety of contexts and questions about lying and politics. Surprisingly, he concludes by asking if lying in politics is really all that bad. The political hypocrisy that Americans in particular periodically decry may be, in Jay s view, the best alternative to the violence justified by those who claim to know the truth. -- Amazon.com.