Critical Encounters, a study of contemporary philosophy and political and social theory, inserts itself into ongoing conversation at the junctures of philosophy and political thought, and modernity and post-modernism. Through dialogue and critique Fred R. Dallmayr seeks to find a viable path for political theory in the midst of contemporary discussions in philosophy and the social sciences, shadowed by twentieth-century phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, structuralism, pragmatism, and deconstruction.