Plato and the Invention of Life

Michael Naas (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

288 Seiten

2018
Fordham University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8232-7968-5 (ISBN)

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Beginning with a reading of Plato’s Statesman, this work interrogates the relationship between life and being in Plato’s thought. It argues that in his later dialogues Plato discovers—or invents—a form of true or real life that transcends all merely biological life and everything that is commonly called life.

The question of life, Michael Naas argues, though rarely foregrounded by Plato, runs through and structures his thought. By characterizing being in terms of life, Plato in many of his later dialogues, including the Statesman, begins to discover—or, better, to invent—a notion of true or real life that would be opposed to all merely biological or animal life, a form of life that would be more valuable than everything we call life and every life that can actually be lived.

This emphasis on life in the Platonic dialogues illuminates the structural relationship between many of Plato’s most time-honored distinctions, such as being and becoming, soul and body. At the same time, it helps to explain the enormous power and authority that Plato’s thought has exercised, for good or ill, over our entire philosophical and religious tradition.

Lucid yet sophisticated, Naas’s account offers a fundamental rereading of what the concept of life entails, one that inflects a range of contemporary conversations, from biopolitics, to the new materialisms, to the place of the human within the living world.

Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. He is the author of Class Acts: Derrida on the Public Stage (2022), Apocalyptic Ruin and Everyday Wonder in Don DeLillo’s America (2022), Don DeLillo, American Original: Drugs, Weapons, Erotica, and Other Literary Contraband (2020), Plato and the Invention of Life (2018), The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar (2015), Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (2012), Derrida From Now On (2008), Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction (2003), and Turning: From Persuasion to Philosophy (1994). He is co-translator of a number of books by Jacques Derrida, including Life Death (2020), and is a member of the Derrida Seminars Editorial Team.

Introduction: Philosophy’s Gigantomachia over Life and Being

1. The Lifelines of the Statesman

2. Life and Spontaneity

3. The Shepherd and the Weaver: A Foucauldian Fable

4. The Measure of Life and Logos

5. Fruits of the Poisonous Tree: Plato and Alcidamas on the Evils of Writing

6. The Life of Law and the Law of Life

7. Plato and the Invention of Life Itself

Conclusion: Life on the Line

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	16.04.2018
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Metaphysik / Ontologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie Altertum / Antike
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Naturwissenschaften
ISBN-10	0-8232-7968-5 / 0823279685
ISBN-13	978-0-8232-7968-5 / 9780823279685
Zustand	Neuware