The Socratic Tradition

Man by nature desires to know, and the most natural way of satisfying this desire is to find answers to the questions that arise from wonder and perplexity. Questioning is our default view of method. I was turned into a cornerstone of western thought in the Socratic elenchus and Aristotlés doctrine of explanation and inquiry. Aristotlés dialogical games, especially as they find expression in Topics, survived medieval dialectical games and had a profound impact on practices in academic life. And even when
Aristotelianism came under fire during the renaissance and the
Scientific Revolution, questioning as method was not jettisoned but rather transformed into a new form in which the questions were to be addressed to Nature herself.

Questioning is not just a method but also a philosophy in its own right. Man not only desires to know, but wonder and perplexity are at the very heart of mańs essence. As Karl-
Otto Apel persuasively argues, Gadameŕs Truth and Method was not just, or perhaps even mainly, a methodological insight into how knowledge was to be obtained. Rather, in philosophical hermeneutics questioning has a more profound standing, marking, as Apel puts it, "logos-reflection" and hence dialogue in the full sense.

This collection of essays by leading philosophers probes questioning as philosophy and as method both from a historical and a systematic perspective. The authors include
J. Hintikka, P. Aubenque, R. Smith, M.-L. Kakkuri-Knuuttila,
E. Moutsopoulos, T. Calvo Martínez, M. Yrjönsuuri, J.-F.
Courtine, K.-O. Appel, V. A. Lektorsky, G. Schurz, M.
Sintonen, and W. Rabinowicz & L. Bovens