Plato And The Foundations Of Metaphysics

This is a book about the relationship of the two traditions of Platonic interpretation -- the indirect and the direct traditions, the written dialogues and the unwritten doctrines. Kramer, who is the foremost proponent of the Tubingen School of interpretation, presents the unwritten doctrines as the crown of Plato's system and the key revealing it. Kramer unfolds the philosophical significance of the unwritten doctrines in their fullness. He demonstrates the hermeneutic fruitfulness of the unwritten doctrines when applied to the dialogues. He shows that the doctrines are a revival of the presocratic theory renovated and brought to a new plane through Socrates. In this way, Plato emerges as the creator of classical metaphysics. In the Third Part, Kramer compares the structure of Platonism, as construed by the Tubingen School, with current philosophical structures such as analytic philosophy, Hegel, phenomenology, and Heidegger. Of the five appendices, the most important presents English translations of the ancient testimonies on the unwritten doctrines. These include the "self-testimonies of Plato." There is also a bibliography on the problem of the unwritten doctrines.

This is a book about the relationship of the two traditions of Platonic interpretation -- the indirect and the direct traditions, the written dialogues and the unwritten doctrines. Kramer, who is the foremost proponent of the Tubingen School of interpretation, presents the unwritten doctrines as the crown of Plato's system and the key revealing it. Kramer unfolds the philosophical significance of the unwritten doctrines in their fullness. He demonstrates the hermeneutic fruitfulness of the unwritten doctrines when applied to the dialogues. He shows that the doctrines are a revival of the presocratic theory renovated and brought to a new plane through Socrates. In this way, Plato emerges as the creator of classical metaphysics. In the Third Part, Kramer compares the structure of Platonism, as construed by the Tubingen School, with current philosophical structures such as analytic philosophy, Hegel, phenomenology, and Heidegger. Of the five appendices, the most important presents English translations of the ancient testimonies on the unwritten doctrines. These include the "self-testimonies of Plato." There is also a bibliography on the problem of the unwritten doctrines.

Blake E. Hestir's examination of Plato's conception of truth challenges a long tradition of interpretation in ancient scholarship.

Offers an innovative reading of Plato, analyzing his metaphysical, ethical, and political commitments in connection with feminist critiques. For centuries, it has been the prevailing view that in prioritizing the soul, Plato ignores or even abhors the body; however, in Plato and the Body Coleen P. Zoller argues that Plato does value the body and the role it plays in philosophical life, focusing on Plato’s use of Socrates as an exemplar. Zoller reveals a more refined conception of the ascetic lifestyle epitomized by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo, Symposium, Phaedrus, Gorgias, and Republic. Her interpretation illuminates why those who want to be wise and good have reason to be curious about and love the natural world and the bodies in it, and has implications for how we understand Plato’s metaphysical and political commitments. This book shows the relevance of this broader understanding of Plato for work on a variety of relevant contemporary issues, including sexual morality, poverty, wealth inequality, and peace. Coleen P. Zoller is Professor of Philosophy at Susquehanna University.

The most widely accepted view in the West today, particularly among postmodernists, is that Plato attempted to ground politics on a rational metaphysics and initiated the tradition of foundationalism that has given rise to systems of oppression ranging from racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism to the technological mastery of the earth. Metaphysics as Rhetoric controverts this view, arguing that Plato was not the originator of this metaphysical tradition. Using as a basis the tenth-century Muslim philosopher Alfarabi's interpretation of Plato, especially his Summary of Plato's "Laws", Parens shows that what appears to be Plato's metaphysics was intended as a rhetorical defense of his politics. Parens demonstrates that rather than seek to establish politics on the definitive metaphysical ground, Alfarabi's Plato analyzes politics on its own terms, phenomenologically.

Studies of Plato’s metaphysics have tended to emphasise either the radical change between the early Theory of Forms and the late doctrines of the Timaeus and the Sophist, or to insist on a unity of approach that is unchanged throughout Plato’s career. The author lays out an alternative approach. Focussing on two metaphysical doctrines of central importance to Plato’s thought – the Theory of Forms and the doctrine of Being and Becoming – he suggests a continuous progress can be traced through Plato’s works. He presents his argument through an examination of the metaphysical sections of six of the dialogues: the Euthyphro, Phaedo, Republic, Parmenides, Timaeus, and Sophist.

A literary and historical analysis of the structure and meaning of recurrent symbols, images, and actions employed in Plato’s dialogues. In this book, Clinton DeBevoise Corcoran examines the use of place in Plato’s dialogues. Corcoran argues that spatial representations, such as walls, caves, and roads, as well as the creation of eternal patterns and chaotic images in the particular spaces, times, characterizations, and actions of the dialogues, provide clues to Plato’s philosophic project. Throughout the dialogues, the Good serves as an overarching ordering principle for the construction of place and the proper limit of spaces, whether they be here in the world, deep in the underworld, or in the nonspatial ideal realm of the Forms. The Good, since it escapes the limits of space and time, equips Plato with a powerful mythopoetic tool to create settings, frames, and arguments that superimpose different dimensions of reality, allowing worlds to overlap that would otherwise be incommensurable. The Good also serves as a powerful ethical tool for evaluating the order of different spaces. Corcoran explores how Plato uses wrestling and war as metaphors for the mixing of the nonspatial, eternal forms in the world and history, and how he uses spatial images throughout the dialogues to critique Athens’s tragic overreach in the Peloponnesian War. Far from merely an incidental backdrop in the dialogues, place etches the tragic intersection of the mortal and the immortal, good and evil, and Athens’s past, present, and future.