_Dialectic and Dialogue_ seeks to define the method and the aims of Plato's dialectic in both the "inconclusive" dialogues and the dialogues that describe and practice a method of hypothesis. Departing from most treatments of Plato, Gonzalez argues that the philosophical knowledge at which dialectic aims is nonpropositional, practical, and reflexive. The result is a reassessment of how Plato understood the nature of philosophy.

Introduction: What is to be gained from a confrontation between Plato and Heidegger? -- Heidegger's critical reading of Plato in the 1920s -- Dialectic, ethics, and dialogue -- Heidegger's critique of dialectic in the 1920s --Ethics and ontology -- Ethics in Plato's sophist -- Heidegger and dialogue -- Logos and being -- The tensions in Heidegger's critique -- The guiding perspective of Plato as undermining the ontic/ontological distinction -- Heidegger on Plato's forms -- Conclusion: The relation between being and Heidegger (...) on Plato's truth and untruth in the 1930s and 1940s -- From the 1931-32 and 1933-34 courses on the essence of truth to "Plato's doctrine -- Of truth" : Heidegger's transformation of Plato into platonism through the interpretation of the sun and cave analogies of the republic -- The courses on the essence of truth from WS 1931/32 and WS 1933/34 -- Plato's truth in the beitråge of 1936-38 -- Plato's doctrine of truth in 1940 -- The end of truth : the 1964 retraction -- Conclusion: The end of truth? -- The dialogue that could have been : Hidegger on the Theaetetus -- The Theaetetus interpretation in Die Grundbegriffe der antiken philosophie (SS 1926) -- The interpretation of the Theaetetus in the Vom Wesen der wahrheit course of 1931-32 and 1933-34 -- Conclusion: Heidegger's orthodoxy -- The 1942 interpretation of Plato in the myth of the (Republic book 10) -- The Roman versus the Greek conception of truth saying in the myth of ER -- Purging the myth of ER : the ontologizing of ethics and politics -- The Greek experience of the open : a saying that points and hints versus the "Leap" -- Conclusion: Leaping beyond Plato -- Opportunities for a dialogue with Plato in the late Heidegger -- Calculative thinking, meditative thinking, and the practice of dialogue -- Heidegger's critique of logos in the 1930s -- Dialogue as bringing to speech the unsaid -- Plato's dialectic or Hegel's? -- A saying beyond assertion -- Plato's dialogues and Heidegger's leap -- Heidegger and the dialogue form -- Redefining hermeneutics -- Back to the beginning with dialectic and dialogue -- Conclusion: Dialectic versus sophia again -- 7 dialectic and phenomenology in "Zeit und Sein" : a pivotal chapter in Heidegger's confrontation with Plato -- From dialectic and hermeneutics to phenomenology -- The Auseinandersetzung with Plato. (shrink)

In this international and interdisciplinary collection of critical essays, distinguished contributors examine a crucial premise of traditional readings of Plato's dialogues: that Plato's own doctrines and arguments can be read off the statements made in the dialogues by Socrates and other leading characters. The authors argue in general and with reference to specific dialogues, that no character should be taken to be Plato's mouthpiece. This is essential reading for students and scholars of Plato.

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.”. (shrink)

Through the contributions of specialists in the field, this volume addresses the still open question of the role and status of myth in Plato’s dialogues and thereby speaks to the broader problem of the relation between philosophy and ...

The “destructive” appropriation of the Aristotelian concepts of δύναµις and ἐνέργεια played a central role in Martin Heidegger’s own reflection on the meaning of being. While this has been generally known for some time, it is only now that we can understand the full scope, complexity and evolving character of this appropriation. One reason is the fairly recent publication of notes and protocols for seminars Heidegger led on Aristotle as late as the 1940s and 1950s. Another is the existence of (...) student transcripts in the Special Collections Department of Stanford University for a number of unpublished seminars on Aristotle that Heidegger led during the 1920s. Considering all of this material enables us to see both the significance of Heidegger’s interpretation of the δύναµις/ἐνέργιεα pair as well as how this interpretation evolved along with his own “Kehre”: from a “pandynamic” conception of being to being as “Ereignis.”. (shrink)

Pendant l’ete de 1928 Heidegger a offert un seminaire sur le troisieme livre de la Physique d’Aristote et donc sur l’explication aristotelicienne de la nature du mouvement. La derniere seance de ce cours, qui eut lieu le 25 juillet, est d’une grande importance parce que c’est a cette occasion que Heidegger va au livre neuf de la Metaphysique pour essayer de comprendre la notion ontologique qui est a la base de l’interpretation aristotelicienne du mouvement : l’energeia. Mais dans les protocoles (...) de ce seminaire qui se trouvent parmi les papiers de Heidegger et qui ont ete publies recemment dans le volume 83 de la Gesamtausgabe, la seance du 25 juillet se trouve absente. Ce fait a conduit l’editeur a conclure que le seminaire avait pris fin le 23 juillet, sans s’apercevoir donc que la conclusion du seminaire manquait. Il existe heureusement une transcription preservee parmi les papiers de l’etudiante de Heidegger, Helene Weiss, et accessible aujourd’hui dans les archives de l’universite de Stanford. Cette transcription montre que la derniere session eut bien lieu le 25 juillet et nous offre la lecture heideggerienne de Metaphysique IX qui ne se trouve pas dans la version de la Gesamtausgabe. C’est dans le contexte de cette lecture que Heidegger fait la declaration etonnante qui nous concerne ici : ≪Dans la derniere instance, la Metaphysique Θ revient a Platon ; la priorite de l’energeia est fondamentalement la meme chose que l’epekeina des Idees. ≫La première tâche que je me propose ici sera d’expliquer cette déclaration qui suggère une relation tres etroite, ou meme une identite, entre la notion aristotelicienne de l’energeia comme ayant une priorite vis‑a‑vis de la dunamis et la notion platonicienne de l’Idee du Bien comme etant epekeina de l’ousia. Pour cette explication je ferai appel non seulement au contexte du seminaire de 1928, mais aussi aux textes plus tardifs comme les Beitrage et les cours sur Nietzsche dans lesquels Heidegger semble presupposer et développer sa déclaration de 1928. Ma seconde tâche sera de comparer cette thèse heideggerienne a la tentative de Gadamer de surmonter l’opposition traditionnelle entre les ontologies de Platon et d’Aristote en faisant appel a l’idee du bien chez les deux. Cette tentative se trouve dans le texte Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles. La comparaison que j’entreprends ici va montrer certaines affinites entre les interpretations de l’Idee du Bien chez Heidegger et Gadamer, mais aussi de profondes differences qui vont determiner leurs differents projets philosophiques. (shrink)

The study of Plato's dialogues has traditionally oscillated between two paradigms: one that portrays the dialogues as treatises expounding doctrines and one that sees them as purely skeptical, rhetorical, or literary. This collection of new essays by twelve noted Plato scholars illustrates the fruitfulness of breaking away from those paradigms, which have divided Platonic scholarship and led it to a number of dead ends. While the essays are diverse in their approaches, each seeks to find a 'third way' to understand (...) Plato, reading him as neither a dogmatist nor a skeptic but as a philosopher capable of reconciling the content and form of his writings. (shrink)

In the recently published 1924 course, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, Martin Heidegger offers a detailed interpretation of Aristotle’s definition of kinesis in the Physics. This interpretation identifies entelecheia with what is finished and present-at-an-end and energeia with being-at-work toward this end. In arguing against this interpretation, the present paper attempts to show that Aristotle interpreted being from the perspective of praxis rather than poiesis and therefore did not identify it with static presence. The paper also challenges later variations of Heidegger’s (...) interpretation, in particular his account of dunamis in the 1931 course on Metaphysics Theta, which insists that its mode of being is presence-at-hand. By arguing that this reading too is untenable, the paper concludes that Aristotle’s metaphysics is not a metaphysics of presence and that his texts instead point toward a possibility of metaphysics ignored by the attempts of Heidegger and others to overcome it. (shrink)

Heidegger’s recently published 1932 seminar on Plato’s Phaedrus arguably represents his most successful dialogue with Plato, where such dialogue is characterized by both the deepest affinity and the most incisive opposition. The central thesis of Heidegger’s interpretation is that the Phaedrus is not simply a logos about eros, but rather an attempt to show that eros is the very essence of logos and that logos is thereby in its very essence dia-logue. Heidegger is thus here more attuned than ever before (...) to the erotic and dialogical character of philosophy while at the same time concerned with how this conception of philosophy can lead to the eclipse of being and truth. (shrink)

The present paper uses the theme of dialectic and dialogue to begin unraveling the similarities and differences between the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and H.G. Gadamer. Ricoeur is shown to distance himself from Heidegger by insisting on a dimension of explanation and distanciation (which he sometimes identifies with Plato's `descending dialectic') that cannot be reduced to, or absorbed by, understanding and appropriation. This same move, however, leads him to reject Platonic dialogue, with the attendant prioritizing of oral conversation over the (...) written text, as a model for hermeneutics. Ricoeur therefore sees in Gadamer's recourse to such a model a regression to the problematic position of Heidegger. Yet the conception of philosophy as dialectical and dialogical which Gadamer finds in Plato is capable of responding to Ricoeur's objections. Where the fundamental difference between the hermeneutics of Ricoeur and Gadamer emerges is in the question of whether experience is fundamentally dialectical and whether language is inherently dialogical. (shrink)

This paper defends a ‘perspectivist’ reading of Plato’s dialogues. According to this reading, each dialogue presents a particular and limited perspective on the truth, conditioned by the specific context, aim and characters, where this perspective, not claiming to represent the whole truth on a topic, is not incompatible with the possibly very different perspectives found in other dialogues nor, on the other hand, can be subordinated or assimilated to one of these other perspectives. This model is contrasted to the other (...) models that have been proposed, i.e., Unitarianism, Developmentalism, and ‘Prolepticism’, and is shown to address and overcome the limitations of each. One major advantage of ‘perspectivism’ against the other interpretative models is that, unlike them, it can do full justice to the literary and dramatic character of the dialogues without falling into the opposite extreme of turning them into literary games with no positive philosophical content. To say that Plato’s dialogues are ‘perspectivist’ is not to say that they contain no ‘doctrines’ on the soul, for example, but, on the contrary, to stress the plurality of doctrines, with the observation that each is true within the limits of the argumentative function it is introduced to serve and of the specific dialogical context. (shrink)

Faced with the impossibility of saying Being directly given that all language is language of beings, Heidegger proposes an overcoming of logic in favor of what he calls Sigetik: a way of addressing Being in and through silence, i.e., without asserting anything of Being. After considering what such a Sigetik actually involves and how it is possible, this paper asks why Heidegger rejects the alternative of that indirect saying of Being that he identifies with dialectic. It is then argued both (...) that Heidegger's arguments against dialectic are not compelling and that the Beiträge itself, in mostly failing to achieve and sustain the Sigetik it prescribes, cannot fully escape some form of dialectic. Sigetik may prove a lure more threatening to philosophical questioning than the dialectic it seeks, unsuccessfully, to overcome. (shrink)

361DIALECTIC AS ?PHILOSOPHICAL EMBARRASSMENT? * Francisco Gonzalez is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Skidmore College. Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 40, no. 3 361?89 [361] Dialectic as ?Philosophical Embarrassment?: Heidegger?s Critique of Plato?s Method FRANCISCO GONZALEZ* Philosophie ist ein Ringen um die Methode. Hans-Georg Gadamer has expressed the following debt to the thought of Martin Heidegger: ?The philosophical stimuli I received from Heidegger led me more and more into the realm of dialectic, Plato?s as well as Hegel?s.?1 It (...) is therefore surprising to discover that Heidegger himself did not see his thought as leading him into the realm of dialectic. On the contrary, in Being and Time we find a curt and unexplained dismissal of dialectic, specifically Plato?s, as a ?genuine philosophical embarrassment? .2 This dismissal is repeated in the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics course of WS 1929/30 where Heidegger asserts that ?all dialectic in philosophy,? and thus that of Hegel as well as Plato, ?is only the expression of an embarrassment.?3 Only with the publication of Heidegger?s earlier lecture courses from the 1920s, are we in a position to understand and evaluate this surprising dismissal. We are also in a better position to understand why even the later Heidegger failed to reassess his rejection of dialectic, despite the existence of strong incentives for doing so: incentives recognized not only by.. (shrink)

What makes Christopher P. Long’s study of Aristotle’s ontology especially rewarding is that it is philosophically motivated. The goal is not simply to “get right what Aristotle said,” but rather to think in dialogue with Aristotle, which implies a willingness to think beyond and even against him. Long makes the general philosophical motivation of his book perfectly clear: it is the desire to find “a way between the totalizing tendencies of modernism and the anarchy of postmodernism”. This is an ethical (...) motivation, since for Long justice requires both a recognition of the fundamental autarchy of each being and a recognition of principles. But why turn back to an ancient Greek philosopher in this contemporary debate? The reason is that Long sees Aristotle as pointing “to a form of knowledge that is neither totalizing nor anarchic”. This third way of knowing is described by Long as a matter of conceptualizing the individual in such a way as to acknowledge its singularity and not reduce it to the mere instantiation of a concept. It is to see the individual neither as an inexplicable singularity nor as only the particular instantiation of a universal. Long finds this neither/nor in Aristotle’s concept of the τόδε τι, which he at one point aptly describes as “the very conceptualization of that which always escapes the concept” : “The term τόδε τι designates this individual emerging out of its isolated singularity, prior to its being reduced to particularity, the mere instantiation of a dominating concept”. Thus we get the following account of what a non-totalizing and non-anarchic form of knowledge would be like and therefore of what Long seeks to find in Aristotle. (shrink)

a central thesis of martin heidegger's first reading of a Platonic dialogue, the 1924/25 course on the Sophist, was that, "for the Greeks, being means precisely to be present, to be in the present [Anwesend-sein, Gegenwärtig-sein]."1 Heidegger saw this Greek interpretation of being as leading to Plato's specific interpretation of being as eidos or idea. Heidegger makes this clear in the following passage from another Plato course, the 1931–32 course On the Essence of Truth: "'Idea' is the look [der Anblick] (...) of what something offers itself as being. These looks [Anblicke] are that in which the individual thing presents itself as this or that, that in which it is present and presencing [präsent und anwesend].... (shrink)

According to Heidegger’s own testimony, his 1940 essay, “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” is derived from a course he first delivered in 1931/32. Yet, while an interpretation of the Theaetetus is central to the argument in 1931/32, this dialogue is not so much as mentioned in the 1940 essay. The reason is that Heidegger’s own careful and insightful reading of the Theaetetus simply does not support his thesis regarding Plato’s “doctrine of truth.” But then the real interest of this reading is (...) that it affords the opportunity for pursuing a genuine dialogue between Heidegger and Plato that was too abruptly discontinued. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe important role played by Aristotle in Martin Heidegger’s path towards Being and Time during the 1920's is now well documented. Yet an important chapter of this story remains mostly unexplored: Heidegger's early attempt to develop an ontology of life in dialogue with Aristotle. This is because the early seminars in which Heidegger developed his important and highly original interpretation of Aristotle's De Anima remain unpublished : one seminar from the summer of 1921 and one spanning the winter semester of (...) 1922/23 and the summer semester of 1923. In the present paper, I reconstruct Heidegger's key interpretative moves in the latter seminar on the basis of a detailed handwritten transcript preserved among the papers of his student Helene Weiss held at Stanford University. What emerges is a dialogue between Aristotle and Heidegger that enables us better to understand and to question the thought of both philosophers on the phenomenon of life. (shrink)

The present paper has a negative aim and a positive aim, both limited in the present context to a sketch or outline. The negative aim, today less controversial, is to show that Aristotle’s theory of final causality has little or nothing to do with the teleology rejected by modern science and that, therefore, far from having been rendered obsolete, it has yet to be fully understood. This aim will be met through the identification and brief discussion of some key points (...) on which Aristotle’s theory differs from teleology as still commonly understood. The positive aim is more controversial as it proposes that we take an ontology of life as the proper context for understanding the significance and nature of final causation in Aristotle. The argument for final causation, in other words, is that, without it, we would lose the phenomenon of life and, indeed, of nature altogether, reducing nature to the inanimate and mechanical. (shrink)

Socrates can be said to have left the subsequent philosophical tradition with the problem of the relation between philosophy and politics. Already in the Republic the proposal of philosopher-kings represents more a tension than an identity. While Aristotle responds by insisting on a sharp distinction between politics and philosophical wisdom, this distinction proves on closer examination much less sharp than might appear. Heidegger characterizes philosophy as the only authentic politics and the philosopher as ruling just by virtue of being a (...) philosopher. In contrast, Foucault insists that, if philosophy can play a role in relation to politics by transforming the subject who lives politically, it plays no role within politics. In this contrast can be seen the 'fallout' of the tension bequeathed by Socrates through both Plato and Aristotle. Podría decirse que Sócrates le dejó a la tradición filosófica posterior el problema de la relación entre filosofía y política. Ya en la República la propuesta del rey filósofo representa más una tensión que una identidad. Mientras que la respuesta de Aristóteles insiste en una clara distinción entre la política y la sabiduría filosófica, un examen cuidadoso demuestra que esta distinción es menos clara de lo que parece. Heidegger caracteriza la filosofía como la única política auténtica y al filósofo como gobernante por el mero hecho de ser filósofo. En contraste, Foucault insiste en que si bien la filosofía puede desempeñar un papel en relación con la política al transformar al sujeto que vive políticamente, aquella no desempeña papel alguno dentro de la política. Este contraste ilustra el resultado de la tensión legada por Sócrates a través de Platón y Aristóteles. (shrink)

En este texto discutiremos la tensión entre los nuevos medios y la narratología ocupándonos especialmente del caso del cine. Nuestra tesis será que los nuevos medios tienen que ver básicamente con la ilusión y solo derivadamente con la imaginación; por el contrario, el campo de la literatura tiene que ver solo con la imaginación y no con la ilusión. Si esto es así, algo debe estar mal con la pretensión de la narratología de ser el esquema teórico adecuado para entender (...) cualquier fenómeno cultural, especialmente el de losnuevos medios. Insistiremos, por ello, en la distinción entre ilusión e imaginación. De hecho, los teóricos literarios no lo consideran. Se suele decir que el cine es ficción, y de hecho la literatura es ficción, pero el cine es mucho más que la ficción, es una ilusión.Here we will discuss the tension between the new mass media and narratology and the case in study will be cinema. Our thesis would be that new mass media have to do basically with illusion and only derivatively with imagination; on the contrary, the field of literature has to do only with imagination, not with illusion at all. If it is so, something must be wrong with the pretence of narratology to be the adequate theoretical schema in order to understand every cultural phenomenon, especially in the case of new mass media. We have to insist on the distinction between illusion and imagination. In fact, literary theoreticians do mostly not consider it. It is usually said of cinema that it is fiction, and indeed literature is fiction, but cinema is much more than fiction, it is illusion. (shrink)

La idea de ciudadanía conlleva las nociones de derechos, pertenencia política y obligaciones cívicas. El distinto énfasis sobre cada uno de estos elementos nos remite a tradiciones histórica e intelectualmente distintas en su concepción. No obstante, el principio de la autonomía de las identidades, tal y como se reclama en numerosos países nacionalmente plurales, plantea todo un desafío a la forma en que tradicionalmente se han venido planteando las virtudes políticas de la ciudadanía, Este artículo parte de una revisión histórica (...) de las nociones liberal y republicana de la misma, analiza su relación con la idea de la nacionalidad y termina con una reflexión sobre la lealtad como virtud política y las condiciones para su posible reformulación como patriotismo federal en los Estados plurinacionales. (shrink)

What makes Christopher P. Long’s study of Aristotle’s ontology especially rewarding is that it is philosophically motivated. The goal is not simply to “get right what Aristotle said,” but rather to think in dialogue with Aristotle, which implies a willingness to think beyond and even against him. Long makes the general philosophical motivation of his book perfectly clear: it is the desire to find “a way between the totalizing tendencies of modernism and the anarchy of postmodernism”. This is an ethical (...) motivation, since for Long justice requires both a recognition of the fundamental autarchy of each being and a recognition of principles. But why turn back to an ancient Greek philosopher in this contemporary debate? The reason is that Long sees Aristotle as pointing “to a form of knowledge that is neither totalizing nor anarchic”. This third way of knowing is described by Long as a matter of conceptualizing the individual in such a way as to acknowledge its singularity and not reduce it to the mere instantiation of a concept. It is to see the individual neither as an inexplicable singularity nor as only the particular instantiation of a universal. Long finds this neither/nor in Aristotle’s concept of the τόδε τι, which he at one point aptly describes as “the very conceptualization of that which always escapes the concept” : “The term τόδε τι designates this individual emerging out of its isolated singularity, prior to its being reduced to particularity, the mere instantiation of a dominating concept”. Thus we get the following account of what a non-totalizing and non-anarchic form of knowledge would be like and therefore of what Long seeks to find in Aristotle. (shrink)