Plato's Stranger: An Essay (SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy) - Hardcover

Gasché, Rodolphe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 143849033X ISBN 13: 9781438490335

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2022

Synopsis

The dramatic introduction in two of Plato's late dialogues-the Sophist and the Statesman, both part of a trilogy that also includes the Theaetetus-of a stranger, the Eleatic Stranger, who replaces Socrates, is a consequential move, especially since it occurs in the context of decidedly new insights into the philosophical logos and life together in a community. The introduction of a radical stranger, a stranger to all native identity, has theoretical implications, and, rather than a rhetorical or merely literary device, is of the order of an argument. Plato's Stranger argues that in these late dialogues, Plato bestows on the West a philosophical and political legacy at the core of which the stranger holds a prominent place because it provides the foreigner-the other-with a previously unheard-of constitutive role in the way thinking, as well as life in community, is understood. What is to be learned from these late dialogues is that, without a constitutive relation to otherness, discursive and political life in a community-in other words, also of the way one relates to oneself-remain lacking.

About this title

About the Author

Rodolphe Gasché is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. His many books include Storytelling: The Destruction of the Inalienable in the Age of the Holocaust, also published by SUNY Press.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 143849033X
• ISBN 13: 9781438490335
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 221