Plato and the Invention of Life (eBook)

Michael Naas (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018
288 Seiten
Fordham University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8232-7969-2 (ISBN)

Infos

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.

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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.

Autor

Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. His books include The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida's Final Seminar and Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (both Fordham).

Inhalt

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

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 3.4.2018
• Verlagsort: New York
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 150 x 150 mm
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Metaphysik / Ontologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften
• Schlagworte: Bare life • biopower • Jacques Derrida • Life • Myth • Ontology • Plato • Statesmanship
• ISBN-10: 0-8232-7969-3 / 0823279693
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-7969-2 / 9780823279692