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.

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.”

Given the conception of philosophy held by continental thinkers, and in particular their greater sensitivity to the kinship of philosophy and literature, Drew A. Hyland argues that they should be much more attentive to the literary dimension of Plato's thinking than they have been. He believes they would find in the dialogues not the various forms of "Platonism" that they wish to reject, but instead a thinking much more congenial and challenging to their own predilections. By carefully examining the works of Heidegger, Derrida, Irigaray, and Cavarero, Hyland points to the tendency of continental thinkers to view Plato's dialogues through the lens of Platonism, thus finding Platonic metaphysics, Platonic ethics, and Platonic epistemology, while overlooking the literary dimension of the dialogues, and failing to recognize the extent to which the form undercuts anything like the Platonism they find. The striking exception, Hyland claims, is Hans-Georg Gadamer who also demonstrates the compatibility of the Platonic dialogues with the directions of continental thinking.

Taking Plato’s allegory of the cave as its starting-point, this book demonstrates how later European thinkers can be read as a reaction and a response to key aspects of this allegory and its discourse of enchainment and liberation. Focusing on key thinkers in the tradition of European (and specifically German) political thought including Kant, Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School, it relates them back to such foundational figures as Rousseau, Aristotle, and in particular Plato. All these thinkers are considered in relation to key passages from their major works, accompanied by an explanatory commentary which seeks to follow a conceptual and imagistic thread through the labyrinth of these complex, yet fascinating, texts. This book will appeal in particular to scholars of political theory, philosophy, and German language and culture.

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.

This book presents an original and creative enactment of a confrontation between Heidegger and Plato. Gregory Fried outlines a new approach to ethics and politics combining skeptical idealism and what he calls polemical ethics, and goes on to apply polemical ethics to the crucial questions around fascism and racism.

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.

This book explains how to read Plato, emphasizing the philosophic importance of the dramatic aspects of the dialogues, and showing that Plato is an ironic thinker and that his irony is deeply rooted in his philosophy.

Death is one of those few topics that attract the attention of just about every significant thinker in the history of Western philosophy, and this attention has resulted in diverse and complex views on death and what comes after. In Meaning and Mortality, Adam Buben offers a remarkably useful new framework for understanding the ways in which philosophy has discussed death by focusing first on two traditional strains in the discussion, the Platonic and the Epicurean. After providing a thorough account of this ancient dichotomy, he describes the development of an alternative means of handling death in Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, whose work on death tends to overshadow Kierkegaard's despite the undeniable influence exerted on him by the nineteenth-century Dane. Buben argues that Kierkegaard and Heidegger prescribe a peculiar way of living with death that offers a kind of compromise between the Platonic and the Epicurean strains.

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.