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A major new critical assessment of Heidegger's interpretation and political use of Plato's Republic.
- Imprint: Continuum
- Series: Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy
- Pub. date: 22 Dec 2009
- ISBN: 9781441184894
240 Pages, hardcover
World rights
Translation Rights Available
$130.00
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Description
Heidegger’s Platonism challenges Heidegger’s 1940 interpretation of Plato as the philosopher who initiated the West’s ontological decline into contemporary nihilism. Mark A. Ralkowski argues that, in his earlier lecture course, On the Essence of Truth, in which he appropriates Plato in a positive light, Heidegger discovered the two most important concepts of his later thought, namely the difference between the Being of beings and Being as such, and the ‘belonging together’ of Being and man in what he eventually calls Ereignis, the ‘event of appropriation’.
Ralkowski shows that, far from being the grand villain of metaphysics, Plato was in fact the gateway to Heidegger’s later period. Because Heidegger discovers the seeds of his later thought in his positive appropriation of Plato, this book argues that Heidegger’s later thought is a return to and phenomenological transformation of Platonism, which is ironic not least because Heidegger thought of himself as the West’s first truly post-Platonic philosopher.
Table of Contents
1. What is Platonism?
2. Untying Schleiermacher's Gordian Knot
3. The Context of Heidegger's Interpretation of Plato
4. Heidegger's Platonism
5. Heidegger's Crisis and Opportunity
6. Revolutionary Thinker or Utopian Social Engineer?
7. Back from Syracuse? Four Reasons to Rethink Heidegger's Politics
8. How Heidegger Should Have Read Plato
Bibliography
Index
Author(s)
Mark A. Ralkowski, Mark A. Ralkowski teaches philosophy at the University of New Mexico, USA. He edited Carol J. White’s Time and Death: Heidegger's Analysis of Finitude (Ashgate, 2005).
Reviews
“Mark Ralkowski is an insightful thinker and a lucid writer, and he makes a powerful case here for taking the deep parallels between Plato and Heidegger seriously … His book is critical and yet beautifully written, and draws ecumenically on the best resources of all the important traditions involved. This is no mean feat, but the creative product of a mature and highly disciplined philosophical mind.” – Iain Thomson, University of New Mexico, USA, author of Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of the University (Cambridge UP, 2005).
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“An extraordinarily lucid and accessible study of Heidegger’s (mis)reading of Plato that transforms our view of both philosophers in offering us a Plato nothing like the utopian and dogmatic metaphysician of the textbooks and a Heidegger whose later thought was heavily indebted to the Greek philosopher but whose politics failed to learn from him a most important lesson: humility.” – Francisco J. Gonzalez, University of Ottawa, Canada
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