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In recent years, Friedman has been closely involved with the communication field and with the development of a dialogic perspective within communication. In 1986 he cochaired with Kenneth Cissna a full day seminar devoted to the topic of confirmation for the Speech Communication Association convention in Chicago. There he came into personal contact with Ken Cissna, Rob Anderson, Ron Arnett, and John Stewart, with whom he had already had correspondence in the 1970s. In the -years that followed, Fried,man had on-going interactions with all of these communication researchers. In October 1991, Cissna, Anderson, Stewart, and Arnett made presentations at Friedman's international interdisciplinary conference on "Martin Buber's Impact on the Human Sciences" at San Diego State University, and later he was featured at a program centered on his work at the 1996 NCA conference in San Diego. Kenneth Cissna and Ron Arnett have both contributed essays to The Way of Dialogue, a forthcoming volume edited by Kenneth Kramer devoted to the work of Maurice Friedman.
The following dialogue is based upon conversations that took place at Ursinus College in May 1999.
J: Would you agree that interest in dialogue and the dialogical is at a peak right now?
M: Yes, a lot of people are coming to the dialogical as a way of knowing, as an approach to life. Some more fully and some more partially. For many of these people, Buber is very important. There was a time when Buber was not taken seriously philosophically, but now, you see, especially with the socalled postmodern, people are taking very seriously dialogue and things that go beyond earlier ways of knowing. Buber was certainly a pioneer in that. Take the dialogical psychotherapy movement. In an article on the dialogical psychotherapy movement I've said that most people who write in it have been influenced by Buber. Some have not.
Once I was speaking for a labor-Zionist group in New York and the woman who had organized it said, "Why is it that the words 'commitment' and 'dialogue' are so important now?" This was many years ago. I thought a moment and said, "it must be because there is so little of either." Then, too, a lot of people speak of dialogue who do not understand...