ABSTRACT
Concern for dialogue as the establishment of genuine communication between I and Thou is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Surely, it is not the case that philosophers from Plato to Diderot, Hegel, and Feuerbach, or playwrights from Sophocles to Ibsen and Strindberg, were not concerned with dialogue, and its cognate dialectics before that. However, it is only in the twentieth century that the problem of distinguishing genuinely interpersonal communication from its counterfeits has had a way of pressing itself upon reflective human beings as the central ethical and philosophical problem.
