Plato and Heidegger
Plato and Heidegger

Author: Francisco J. Gonzalez

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-09-10

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 0271050292

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In a critique of Heidegger that respects his path of thinking, Francisco Gonzalez looks at the ways in which Heidegger engaged with Plato’s thought over the course of his career and concludes that, owing to intrinsic requirements of Heidegger’s own philosophy, he missed an opportunity to conduct a real dialogue with Plato that would have been philosophically fruitful for us all. Examining in detail early texts of Heidegger’s reading of Plato that have only recently come to light, Gonzalez, in parts 1 and 2, shows there to be certain affinities between Heidegger’s and Plato’s thought that were obscured in his 1942 essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” on which scholars have exclusively relied in interpreting what Heidegger had to say about Plato. This more nuanced reading, in turn, helps Gonzalez provide in part 3 an account of Heidegger’s later writings that highlights the ways in which Heidegger, in repudiating the kind of metaphysics he associated with Plato, took a direction away from dialectic and dialogue that left him unable to pursue those affinities that could have enriched Heidegger’s own philosophy as well as Plato’s. “A genuine dialogue with Plato,” Gonzalez argues, “would have forced [Heidegger] to go in certain directions where he did not want to go and could not go without his own thinking undergoing a radical transformation.”

Heidegger and Plato
Heidegger and Plato

Author: Catalin Partenie

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2005-08-26

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0810122332

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For Martin Heidegger the "fall" of philosophy into metaphysics begins with Plato. Thus, the relationship between the two philosophers is crucial to an understanding of Heidegger--and, perhaps, even to the whole plausibility of postmodern critiques of metaphysics. It is also, as the essays in this volume attest, highly complex, and possibly founded on a questionable understanding of Plato. As editors Catalin Partenie and Tom Rockmore remark, a simple way to describe Heidegger's reading of Plato might be to say that what began as an attempt to appropriate Plato (and through him a large portion of Western philosophy) finally ended in an estrangement from both Plato and Western philosophy. The authors of this volume consider Heidegger's thought in relation to Plato before and after the "Kehre" or turn. In doing so, they take up various central issues in Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) and thereafter, and the questions of hermeneutics, truth, and language. The result is a subtle and multifaceted reinterpretation of Heidegger's position in the tradition of philosophy, and of Plato's role in determining that position.

Towards a Polemical Ethics
Towards a Polemical Ethics

Author: Gregory Fried

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-04-07

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1786610027

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Martin Heidegger held Plato responsible for inaugurating the slow slide of the West into nihilism and the apocalyptic crisis of modernity. In this book, Gregory Fried defends Plato against Heidegger’s critiques. While taking seriously Heidegger’s analysis of human finitude and historicity, Fried argues that Heidegger neglects the transcending ideals that necessarily guide human life as situated in time and place. That neglect results in Heidegger’s disastrous politics, unhinged from a practical reason grounded in the philosophical search from a truth that transcends historical contingency. Thinking both with and against Heidegger, Fried shows how Plato’s skeptical idealism provides an ethics that captures both the situatedness of finite human existence and the need for transcendent ideals. The result is a novel way of understanding politics and ethical life that Fried calls a polemical ethics, which mediates between finitude and transcendence by engaging in constructive confrontation with both traditions and other persons. The contradiction between the founding ideals of the United States and its actual history of racism and slavery provides an occasion to discuss polemical ethics in practice.

Plato's Sophist
Plato's Sophist

Author: Martin Heidegger

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2003-07-09

Total Pages: 510

ISBN-13: 9780253216298

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This volume reconstructs Martin Heidegger's lecture course at the University of Marburg in the winter semester of 1924-25, which was devoted to an interpretation of Plato and Aristotle. Published for the first time in German in 1992 as volume 19 of Heidegger's Collected Works, it is a major text not only because of its intrinsic importance as an interpretation of the Greek thinkers, but also because of its close, complementary relationship to Being and Time, composed in the same period. In Plato's Sophist, Heidegger approaches Plato through Aristotle, devoting the first part of the lectures to an extended commentary on Book VI of the Nichomachean Ethics. In a line-by-line interpretation of Plato's later dialogue, the Sophist, Heidegger then takes up the relation of Being and non-being, the ontological problematic that forms the essential link between Greek philosophy and Heidegger's thought.

Heidegger, Plato, Philosophy, Death
Heidegger, Plato, Philosophy, Death

Author: Richard Rojcewicz

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-09-27

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1793648417

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Richard Rojcewicz’s Heidegger, Plato, Philosophy, Death: An Atmosphere of Mortality offers an original perspective on the bond between philosophy and death in the thought of Martin Heidegger and Plato. For Heidegger, authentic being-toward-death is not preoccupation with death as such, nor resoluteness in the face of one's demise, but preoccupation with the meaning of the beings—ourselves—who comport themselves understandingly toward death and who breathe an atmosphere of mortality. Authentic dying is then nothing other than the practice of philosophy. For Plato, philosophy is the practice of dying, the separating of the soul to its own autonomous existence. This separation, however, is not that of the soul from the body. Instead, it is separation from common understanding, hearsay, everydayness, and mediocrity. Accordingly, both Heidegger and Plato see an intimate connection between philosophy and death. Rather than a morbid focus on negativity and dissolution, however, this connection leads to a call to being authentic, thinking for oneself, and repudiating the superficiality of the crowd. For both Heidegger and Plato, philosophizing and dying are, most concretely, a matter of heeding the Delphic oracle: Know thyself. Rojcewicz pursues this theme of philosophy and death through the topics of signs, anxiety, conscience, music, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Being and Time
Being and Time

Author: Martin Heidegger

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2008-07-22

Total Pages: 612

ISBN-13: 0061575593

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"What is the meaning of being?" This is the central question of Martin Heidegger's profoundly important work, in which the great philosopher seeks to explain the basic problems of existence. A central influence on later philosophy, literature, art, and criticism—as well as existentialism and much of postmodern thought—Being and Time forever changed the intellectual map of the modern world. As Richard Rorty wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "You cannot read most of the important thinkers of recent times without taking Heidegger's thought into account." This first paperback edition of John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson's definitive translation also features a new foreword by Heidegger scholar Taylor Carman.

The Essence of Truth
The Essence of Truth

Author: Martin Heidegger

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2002-06-18

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780826459237

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The Essence of Truth must count as one of Heidegger's most important works, for nowhere else does he give a comparably thorough explanation of what is arguably the most fundamental and abiding theme of his entire philosophy, namely the difference between truth as the "unhiddenness of beings" and truth as the "correctness of propositions". For Heidegger, it is by neglecting the former primordial concept of truth in favor of the latter derivative concept that Western philosophy, beginning already with Plato, took off on its "metaphysical" course towards the bankruptcy of the present day. This first ever translation into English consists of a lecture course delivered by Heidegger at the University of Freiburg in 1931-32. Part One of the course provides a detailed analysis of Plato's allegory of the cave in the Republic, while Part Two gives a detailed exegesis and interpretation of a central section of Plato's Theaetetus, and is essential for the full understanding of his later well-known essay Plato's Doctrine of Truth. As always with Heidegger's writings on the Greeks, the point of his interpretative method is to bring to light the original meaning of philosophical concepts, especially to free up these concepts to their intrinsic power.

Gadamer's Path to Plato
Gadamer's Path to Plato

Author: Andrew Fuyarchuk

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2010-03-01

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 160608772X

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Gadamer's Path to Plato investigates the formative years of Hans-Georg Gadamer's Plato studies, while studying with Martin Heidegger at Marburg University. It outlines the evolution of Heidegger's understanding of Plato, explains why his hermeneutics and phenomenological method inspired Gadamer, and why Heidegger's argument, that Plato was responsible for Western civilization's forgetting the meaning of existence, provoked him. Heidegger's provocation was crucial to the development of Gadamer's understanding of Plato. This book thus puts forward an argument for Gadamer's having indirectly refuted Heidegger's Plato. This involves a dialogical relationship to the past and a re-examination of the relation of Plato to Aristotle in matters of ethics, physics, and truth. Above all, however, it is Gadamer's concept of Platonic dialectic that refutes Heidegger. This challenge to Heidegger's Plato was commensurate with the origination of Gadamer's positive hermeneutical philosophy. In order to test the alleged openness of that philosophy to the other as other Gadamer's reading of the Republic is scrutinized by using the brilliant scholarship of Stanley Rosen. An examination of their interpretations of the Republic includes an inquiry into their intellectual influences. For Gadamer these include Hegel, the Tubingen school and Jacob Klein; for Rosen, the poetic genius of Leo Strauss. Rosen's mathematical and poetic orientation is then compared to Gadamer's dialectical orientation to Plato. The mathematical approach dovetails with a theory of human nature and procedural rationalism in Gadamer's hermeneutical philosophy that explains why he, in contrast to Rosen, bypasses important dimensions of the Republic such as the significance of particular characters and settings to understanding the whole. In turn, this methodological shortcoming calls into question the truth of Gadamer's method and, with it, the foundations of a truly open and pluralist society.

Postmodern Platos
Postmodern Platos

Author: Catherine H. Zuckert

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1996-06

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9780226993317

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Catherine Zuckert examines the work of five key philosophical figures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the lens of their own decidedly postmodern readings of Plato. She argues that Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, and Derrida, convinced that modern rationalism had exhausted its possibilities, all turned to Plato in order to rediscover the original character of philosophy and to reconceive the Western tradition as a whole. Zuckert's artful juxtaposition of these seemingly disparate bodies of thought furnishes a synoptic view, not merely of these individual thinkers, but of the broad postmodern landscape as well. The result is a brilliantly conceived work that offers an innovative perspective on the relation between the Western philosophical tradition and the evolving postmodern enterprise.