Misreading Plato: Continental and Psychoanalytic Glimpses Beyond the Mask (Psychology and the Other)

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. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Series 3 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Table of Contents 8 List of Contributors 11 Foreword 15 Preface 24 PART I Aesthetics as First Philosophy 26 1 The Multiplicity of Man: Beyond the Postmodern 28 2 Farrago: Mythos and Logos in Plato’s Phaedrus 58 3 Plato at the Opera: The Sounds of Philosophia 76 4 True Lies: A Defense of the Sophists 94 PART II The Ethics of Desire 110 5 Blinded by Desire: Self-Deception and the Possibility of the True Lie in Plato’s Republic 112 6 Philosophical “Descent”: Between the Philosopher and the Other 126 7 “Halt!”: Socrates, Levinas, and the Divine Sign 140 8 Ignorance, Flattery, and Dialectic: Philosophical Rhetoric in Plato’s Gorgias 158 PART III The Desire of Ethics 174 9 Being and Seeming: On Socrates’ Ontological Humiliation of the Sophists 176 10 The Noble Taboo: Homoerotic Desire and Philosophic Inquiry 198 11 Division and Proto-Racialism in the Statesman 213 12 Hunting in Plato: On Noticing 232 PART IV Aesthetics as Final Philosophy 252 13 The Philosophical Poet and the Poetic Philosopher 254 14 In Search of the Natural Beginning 265 15 Plato’s Final Dialogue 278 16 Who Is the Philosopher King? 302 Index 308 "This book reorients the scholarship on Plato by returning readers to his most fundamental insights, 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. Contributors offer nuanced, non-traditional readings of Plato, readings that not only analyze but build upon 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"-- Provided by publisher