At no point in this work does Burger enter the terrain of history or biography (1). It seems to me that works setting philosopher X in dialogue with philosopher Y lend themselves to making three types of claims: (1) the biographical claim that any complete account of X's psychological life will need to incorporate Y (2) an evaluative claim that since X purposely constructed premises and conclusions as responses to Y, what X meant and intended by these claims cannot be comprehended without the recognition of Y's influence and (3) the heuristic claim that the reader should keep Y in mind when considering X, as this will bring to light some dimension of X's work which would otherwise have been missed.
Anyone who reads this incredibly thought-provoking book should first decide what he or she expects from a work in the "setting figures in dialogue" genre.
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