Abstract

Bridging the gap between interpretations of "Third Way" Platonic scholarship and "phenomenological-ontological" scholarship, this book argues for a unique ontological-hermeneutic interpretation of Plato and Plato s Socrates. Reconceptualizing Plato s Socrates at the Limit of Education offers a re-reading of Plato and Plato s Socrates in terms of interpreting the practice of education as care for the soul through the conceptual lenses of phenomenology, philosophical hermeneutics, and ontological inquiry. Magrini contrasts his re-reading with the views of Plato and Plato s Socrates that dominate contemporary education, which, for the most part, emerge through the rigid and reductive categorization of Plato as both a "realist" and "idealist" in philosophical foundations texts. This view also presents what he terms the questionable "Socrates-as-teacher" model, which grounds such contemporary educational movements as the Paideia Project, which claims to incorporate, through a "scripted-curriculum" with "Socratic lesson plans," the so-called "Socratic Method" into the Common Core State Standards Curriculum as a "technical" skill that can be taught and learned as part of the students "critical thinking" skills. After a careful reading incorporating what might be termed a "Third Way" of reading Plato and Plato s Socrates, following scholars from the Continental tradition, Magrini concludes that a so-called "Socratic education" would be nearly impossible to achieve and enact in the current educational milieu of standardization or neo-Taylorism. However, despite this, he argues in the affirmative that there is much educators can and must learn from this "non-doctrinal" re-reading and re-characterization of Plato and Plato s Socrates. "