The book records the author’s personal and intellectual maturation over a period of nine decades. This maturation was never purely self-propelled, but always occurred in response to teachings and experiences. Situated as a “being-in-the-world”, the author’s experiences reach from World War II via the Cold War to recent “terror wars.” Intellectually, he participated in and reacted to a number of major perspectives: from phenomenology, existentialism, and critical theory to hermeneutics, postmodernism, and post-secularism. Exchanges with multiples interlocutors helped to shape his distinctive outlook or profile; which privileges self-other contacts over the ego, dialogue over monologue, and dialogical cosmopolitanism over chauvinistic power politics. Implicit in this emerging profile is a preference for potentiality over actuality and of relationality over static identity. Shunning doctrinal formulas or finished “systems”, the author’s life thus is shown to be simply a journey, an adventure to what comes, an itinerary (mentis in Deum).

Fred Dallmayr is Packey J. Dee Professor Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. Born in Ulm, Germany, in 1928 he grew up in Augsburg, received a doctorate in law at the University of Munich in 1955 and a PhD in political science from Duke University in 1960. He specializes in modern and contemporary political philosophy, comparative philosophy, and intercultural studies. He has published some 40 books, 18 edited books, 140 book chapters, and some 200 journal articles.