1st Edition
misReading Plato Continental and Psychoanalytic Glimpses Beyond the Mask
This book reorients the scholarship on Plato by returning readers to his most fundamental insights and reflections on the nature of the human psyche and the human condition.
By approaching the dialogue anew, as if for the first time, the book creates new intellectual pathways by opening the conversation to a clash of ideas. The contributors offer nuanced, nontraditional readings of Plato, readings that not only analyze but also build on the dialogues by bringing them into conversation with psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and contemporary continental thought more broadly. It addresses a major gap in the literature caused by reading Plato as a metaphysician or moral or political philosopher and not, primarily, as a psychologist.
Psychologists and scholars in philosophy, psychoanalysis, Platonic thought, and other humanities-related disciplines will find this new approach to Plato refreshing, accessible, and uniquely innovative.
Foreword: The Parodic Plato
John Panteleimon Manoussakis
1. The Multiplicity of Man: Beyond the Postmodern
Matthew Clemente
2. Farrago: Mythos and Logos in Plato's Phaedrus
Bryan J. Cocchiara
3. Plato at the Opera: The Sounds of Philosophia
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
4. True Lies: A Defense of the Sophists
Simon Critchley
5. Blinded by Desire: Self-Deception and the Possibility of the True Lie in Plato's Republic
Stephen Mendelsohn
6. Philosophical "Descent": Between the Philosopher and the Other
Melissa Fitzpatrick
7. "Halt!": Socrates, Levinas, and the Divine Sign
Eric R. Severson
8. Ignorance, Flattery, and Dialectic: Philosophical Rhetoric in Plato's Gorgias
Christine Rojcewicz
9. Being & Seeming: On Socractes' Ontological Humiliation of the Sophists
William J. Hendel
10. The Noble Taboo: Homoerotic Desire and Philosophic Inquiry
Andrew J. Zeppa
11. Division and Proto-Racialism in the Statesman
John D. Proios
12. Hunting in Plato: On Noticing
Donald N. Boyce
13. The Philosophical Poet and the Poetic Philosopher
M. Saverio Clemente in Dialogue with Richard Kearney
14. In Search of the Natural Beginning
A Conversation with Stephen Mendelsohn and John Sallis
15. Plato's Final Dialogue
David Roochnik
16. Who is the Philosopher King?
Jean-Luc Beauchard
Biography
Matthew Clemente is a husband and father of five. He lives and writes in Boston, Massachusetts, where he holds teaching appointments at Boston College and Boston University. He has published seven books, most recently Eros Crucified: Death, Desire, and the Divine in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Religion, and is the assistant editor of the Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion.
Bryan J. Cocchiara is currently an adjunct professor of philosophy at Brookdale Community College. He received his MA from Boston College in 2014, where he was a research fellow at the Lonergan Institute. He received his STM from Drew University in 2021, where he specialized in philosophical and theological studies in religion. He is the co-editor of misReading Nietzsche (Pickwick Publications, 2018).
William J. Hendel is a teaching fellow at Boston College, who specializes in ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and contemporary continental philosophy.
"This collection is a fascinating set of well researched and creative essays that encourage us to rethink how we read Plato. These authors bring together expertise in ancient and continental philosophy in engaging formats—including interviews with Kearney and Sallis, and an imagined "last dialogue" of Plato, written by David Roochnik. The volume is deeply dialogical in approach."
Marina Berzins McCoy, Professor of Philosophy, Boston College, USA
