No overall history of the philosophical dialogue has appeared since Rudolf Hirzel's two-volume study was published in 1895. In The Philosophical Dialogue: A Poetics and a Hermeneutics, Vittorio H sle covers the development of the genre from its beginning with Plato to the late twentieth-century work of Iris Murdoch and Paul Feyerabend. H sle presents a taxonomy and a doctrine of categories for the complex literary genre of the philosophical...