This important book brings together in one volume a collection of illuminating encounters with some of the most important philosophers of our age - by one of its most incisive and innovative critics. For more than 20 years, Richard Kearney has been in conversation with leading philosophers, literary theorists, anthropologists, and religious scholars. His gift is eliciting memorably clear statements about their work from thinkers whose writings can often be challenging in their complexity.;Here, he brings together eighteen extraordinary conversations - first from his 1984 collection, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage, with portions of its 1995 expanded edition; States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers. Featured interviewees include Stanislas Breton, Umberto Eco, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. To this classic core, he adds recent interviews, all of them unpublished, with Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, and George Dumezil, as well as two conversations about his own work.