Gadamer's Path to Plato

Gadamer's Path to Plato
Author: Andrew Fuyarchuk
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2010-03-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 160608772X

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.

Dialogue and Dialectic

Dialogue and Dialectic
Author: Hans-Georg Gadamer
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1983-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780300029833

The author approaches Plato's dialogues as live discussions in which the concrete concerns of the participants define the horizons of discourse. He takes up such perplexing problems of Plato's though as the role of poetry in the state and the theory of ideal numbers and brings to them a fresh understanding. With its emphasis on the dialogue form and the dramatic situation, this work complements the main tendencies of the analytical tradition which dominates contemporary Anglo-Saxon writing on Plato.

Postmodern Platos

Postmodern Platos
Author: Catherine H. Zuckert
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 1996-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780226993317

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.

The Gadamerian Mind

The Gadamerian Mind
Author: Theodore George
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 758
Release: 2021-08-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0429514581

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) is one of the most important philosophers of the post-1945 era. His name has become all but synonymous with the philosophical study of hermeneutics, the field concerned with theories of understanding and interpretation and laid out in his landmark book Truth and Method. Influential not only within continental philosophy, Gadamer’s thought has also made significant contributions to related fields such as religion, literary theory, and education. The Gadamerian Mind is a major survey of the fundamental aspects of Gadamer’s thought, with contributions from leading scholars of Gadamer and hermeneutics from around the world. 38 chapters are divided into six clear parts: Overviews Key concepts Historical influences Contemporary encounters Beyond philosophy Legacies and questions. Although Gadamer’s work addresses a remarkable range of topics, careful consideration is given throughout the volume to consistent concerns that orient his thought. Important in this respect is his relation to philosophers in the Western tradition, from Plato to Heidegger. An indispensable resource for anyone studying and researching Gadamer, hermeneutics, and the history of twentieth-century philosophy, The Gadamerian Mind will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as religion, literature, political theory, and education.

The Inner Voice in Gadamer's Hermeneutics

The Inner Voice in Gadamer's Hermeneutics
Author: Andrew Fuyarchuk
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2017-07-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1498547060

The inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics refers to the meaning that exceeds anything explicitly said. This explanation has been subsumed within metaphysical and theological parameters of interpretation with little regard for the implication of Gadamer’s turn to the living language for understanding the inner word. Through examining his phenomenology of the inner word, The Inner Voice in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics reveals its musical (rhythmic and tonal) dimensions and how they function to harmonize disparate orientations in the middle voice, above all for Gadamer, those that underlie modes of cognition in both the humanities and the sciences—a visual and auditory ethos. However, understood as constituting the music of language discernible in the middle voice, the inner word is also suppressed or forgotten by the technological extension of sight—that is, print—and thus requires a turn of the inner ear or auditory disposition. Andrew Fuyarchuk assesses theories of language in evolutionary and cognitive science in light of Gadamer’s insights into the nature of thought, and he employs them to account for a dimension of language that is inscribed in the lingual minds of our species. When recalled by the inner ear, this dimension enables us to think such opposites together as we find in the humanities and sciences together. This thinking together is expressed in a double account of an object of inquiry, such as the one Fuyarchuk puts forward about the inner word in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.

Plato and Heidegger

Plato and Heidegger
Author: Francisco J. Gonzalez
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2015-09-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0271050292

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.”

Plato the Teacher

Plato the Teacher
Author: William H. F. Altman
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2012-02-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0739171399

In this unique and important book, William Altman shines a light on the pedagogical technique of the playful Plato, especially his ability to create living discourses that directly address the student. Reviving an ancient concern with reconstructing the order in which Plato intended his dialogues to be taught as opposed to determining the order in which he wrote them, Altman breaks with traditional methods by reading Plato’s dialogues as a multiplex but coherent curriculum in which the Allegory of the Cave occupies the central place. His reading of Plato's Republic challenges the true philosopher to choose the life of justice exemplified by Socrates and Cicero by going back down into the Cave of political life for the sake of the greater Good.

The Place of Prejudice

The Place of Prejudice
Author: Adam Adatto Sandel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2014-06-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674726847

We associate prejudice with ignorance and bigotry and consider it a source of injustice. Can prejudice have a legitimate place in moral and political judgment? Adam Sandel shows that prejudice, properly understood, is not an obstacle to clear thinking but an essential aspect of it. The aspiration to reason without preconceptions is misguided.

From Plato to Platonism

From Plato to Platonism
Author: Lloyd P. Gerson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2013-11-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0801469171

Was Plato a Platonist? While ancient disciples of Plato would have answered this question in the affirmative, modern scholars have generally denied that Plato’s own philosophy was in substantial agreement with that of the Platonists of succeeding centuries. In From Plato to Platonism, Lloyd P. Gerson argues that the ancients were correct in their assessment. He arrives at this conclusion in an especially ingenious manner, challenging fundamental assumptions about how Plato’s teachings have come to be understood. Through deft readings of the philosophical principles found in Plato's dialogues and in the Platonic tradition beginning with Aristotle, he shows that Platonism, broadly conceived, is the polar opposite of naturalism and that the history of philosophy from Plato until the seventeenth century was the history of various efforts to find the most consistent and complete version of "anti-naturalism."Gerson contends that the philosophical position of Plato—Plato’s own Platonism, so to speak—was produced out of a matrix he calls "Ur-Platonism." According to Gerson, Ur-Platonism is the conjunction of five "antis" that in total arrive at anti-naturalism: anti-nominalism, anti-mechanism, anti-materialism, anti-relativism, and anti-skepticism. Plato’s Platonism is an attempt to construct the most consistent and defensible positive system uniting the five "antis." It is also the system that all later Platonists throughout Antiquity attributed to Plato when countering attacks from critics including Peripatetics, Stoics, and Sceptics. In conclusion, Gerson shows that Late Antique philosophers such as Proclus were right in regarding Plotinus as "the great exegete of the Platonic revelation."

The Ethics of Interpretation

The Ethics of Interpretation
Author: Pol Vandevelde
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2023-03-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 100084868X

This book discusses the ethical dimension of the interpretation of texts and events. Its purpose is not to address the neutrality or ideological biases of interpreters, but rather to discuss the underlying issue of the intervention of interpreters into the process of interpretation. The author calls this intervention the "ethical" aspect of interpretation and argues that interpreters are neither neutral nor necessarily activists. He examines three models of interpretation, all of which recognize the role that interpreters play in the process of interpretation. In these models, the question of the truth or validity of interpretation is dependent upon the attitude of interpreters. These three models are: (1) the principle of charity in interpretation in the two different versions defended by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Donald Davidson; (2) the production of truth, as developed by Paul Ricoeur and Michel Foucault; and (3) the regulative principle in interpretation as formal validity claims—as presented by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas—and as benevolence or love as an epistemic virtue—as defended by Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher. The critical discussion of these three models, which brings to the fore the different manners in which interpreters intervene in the process of interpretation as persons, lays the foundations for an ethics of interpretation. The Ethics of Interpretation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in hermeneutics, 19th- and 20th-century philosophy, literary theory, and cultural theory.