Philosophising From Here – Horizon, Place, and the Conditions of Dialogical Encounters

In the following talk, I argue that the horizon, the specific here of the philosopher, is a constitutive site of dialogical encounters. To make this argument, I bring three philosophers into an unresolved conversation: Hans-Georg Gadamer’s understanding of the horizon as the ground for interpretation; Tsenay Serequeberhan’s effort to make the horizon political in the sense that the neo-colonial situation is when a living past has been rendered mute; and Jonathan Chimakonam’s relational horizon – where philosophical encounters happen between conversational partners thinking from their own philosophical places. By holding these three conceptions in productive tension, I argue that dialogical encounters require a mastery of vulnerability. This is demonstrated through philosophical counselling, where the horizon becomes aporia, the moment the practitioner’s conceptual repertoire fails. However, this failure becomes a hermeneutical opening, disclosing the distance between what the practitioner inherits and what the other (conversational partner) brings to the philosophical counselling session.