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.

An inquiry into the clash, or confluence, of the oldest and newest stream of Western philosophical tradition: Hellenic rationalism and its nemesis, poststructuralism. Ten superb scholars from several disciplines engage the ultimate issues of literary theory. An indispensable book. Complete with a comprehensive bibliography, index of names and index of subjects. Contributors: Harry Berger Jr. Page duBois David M. Halperin Djelal Kadir Linda Kintz Sharon Larisch Louis Orsini Steven Shankman Douglass H. Thomson Eugene Webb

"Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, by Paul Allen Miller, argues that a key element of postmodern French intellectual life has been the reception of Plato. This fact has gone underappreciated in the Anglophone world due to a fundamental division in culture. Until very recently, the concerns of academic philosophy and philology have had little in common. On the one hand, this is due to analytic philosophy's self-confinement to questions of epistemology, speech act theory, and philosophy of science. As such, it has had little to say about the relation between antique and contemporary modes of thought." "On the other hand, blindness to the merits of postmodern thought is also due to Anglo-American philology's own parochial instincts. Ensconced within a nineteenth-century model of Alterumswissenchaft, only a minority of classicists have made forays into philosophical, psychoanalytic, and other speculative modes of inquiry. The result has been that postmodern French thought has largely been the province of scholars of modern languages." "A situation thus emerges in which most classicists do not know theory, and so cannot appreciate the scope of these thinkers' contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of Western thought, while most theorists do not know the Platonic texts and their contexts that ground them. This book bridges this gap, offering detailed and theoretically informed readings of French postmodernism's chief thinkers' debts to Plato and the ancient world."--BOOK JACKET.

From Plato to Postmodernism presents the cultural history of the West in one concise volume. Nearly four thousand years of Western history are woven together into an unfolding story in which we see how movements and individuals contributed to the philosophy, literature and art that have shaped today's world. The story begins with the West's Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian origins, moving through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment and Romanticism to twenty-first century postmodernity. The author covers key figures such as Moses, Michelangelo, Mozart and Marx, setting them in context and highlighting their main contributions. Illustrations and a comprehensive glossary help explain important terms such as ‘gothic', ‘baroque', ‘stream of consciousness' and ‘the death of God', and clarify movements such as Neoplatonism, Renaissance humanism and existentialism. For students, this book bridges the gap between what is taught in schools and the cultural knowledge required at university, providing an indispensible grounding in the story of Western culture. For all readers, it offers an invitation to take an enjoyable tour through the fascinating history of Western thought, literature and art.

The present volume argues that Plato and Platonism should be understood not as a series of determinate doctrines or philosophical facts to be pinned down once and for all, but rather as an inexhaustible mine of possible trajectories. The book examines in this light different strands of Platonic thinking from the dialogues themselves through later Antiquity and the Medieval World into Modernity and Post-Modernity with new essays ranging from Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Natorp to Yeats, Levinas and Derrida. And also suggests the possibility of reading the dialogues and the whole tradition resonating in and through them in new, unexpected ways.

Kolb discusses postmodern architectural styles and theories within the context of philosophical ideas about modernism and postmodernism. He focuses on what it means to dwell in a world and within a history and to act from or against a tradition.

This reader provides the textual material for students encountering the authorship debate for the first time. It outlines the issues, explains central theoretical positions, and summarizes the history and possible future directions of the debate. Key writings on authorship are presented.

This volume brings together scholars in classics, political philosophy, and rhetoric to analyze prudence as a distinctive and vital form of political intelligence. Through case studies from each of the major periods in the history of prudence, the authors identify neglected resources for political judgement in today's conditions of pluralism and interdependency. Three assumptions inform these essays: the many dimensions of prudence cannot be adequately represented in the lexicon of any single discipline; the Aristotelian focus on prudence as rational calculation needs to be balanced by the Ciceronian emphasis on prudence as discursive performance embedded in familiar social practices; and understanding prudence requires attention to how it operates thorough the communicative media and public discourses that constitute the political community.

By questioning the modern categories of Plato and Platonism, this book offers new ways of reading the Platonic dialogues and the many traditions that resonate in them from Antiquity to Post-Modernity.