From Plato's contempt for "the madness of the multitude" to Kant's lament for "the great unthinking mass," the history of Western thought is riddled with disdain for ordinary collective life. But it was not until Kierkegaard developed the term "chatter" that this disdain began to focus on the ordinary communicative practiceswhich sustain this form of human togetherness. The Chattering Mind explores the intellectual tradition inaugurated by Kierkegaard's work, tracing the conceptual history of everyday talk from his formative account of chatter to Heidegger's recuperative discussion of...
From Plato's contempt for "the madness of the multitude" to Kant's lament for "the great unthinking mass," the history of Western thought is riddled w...
