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 Half Title Series Title Copyright Dedication Table of Contents List of Contributors Foreword Preface PART I Aesthetics as First Philosophy 1 The Multiplicity of Man: Beyond the Postmodern 2 Farrago: Mythos and Logos in Plato’s Phaedrus 3 Plato at the Opera: The Sounds of Philosophia 4 True Lies: A Defense of the Sophists PART II The Ethics of Desire 5 Blinded by Desire: Self-Deception and the Possibility of the True Lie in Plato’s Republic 6 Philosophical “Descent”: Between the Philosopher and the Other 7 “Halt!”: Socrates, Levinas, and the Divine Sign 8 Ignorance, Flattery, and Dialectic: Philosophical Rhetoric in Plato’s Gorgias PART III The Desire of Ethics 9 Being and Seeming: On Socrates’ Ontological Humiliation of the Sophists 10 The Noble Taboo: Homoerotic Desire and Philosophic Inquiry 11 Division and Proto-Racialism in the Statesman 12 Hunting in Plato: On Noticing PART IV Aesthetics as Final Philosophy 13 The Philosophical Poet and the Poetic Philosopher 14 In Search of the Natural Beginning 15 Plato’s Final Dialogue 16 Who Is the Philosopher King? Index "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