Plato and the Metaphysical Feminine

Plato and the Metaphysical Feminine PDF Author: Irene Han
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191944680
Category : Femininity (Philosophy)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This volume offers a new interpretation of the role of the female and the feminine in Plato's political dialogues. Irene Han provides a reading of Plato's philosophy informed by contemporary theory to demonstrate the centrality of processes of becoming for Platonic accounts of Being.

Plato and the Metaphysical Feminine

Plato and the Metaphysical Feminine PDF Author: Irene Han
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191944680
Category : Femininity (Philosophy)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume offers a new interpretation of the role of the female and the feminine in Plato's political dialogues. Irene Han provides a reading of Plato's philosophy informed by contemporary theory to demonstrate the centrality of processes of becoming for Platonic accounts of Being.

Plato and the Metaphysical Feminine

Plato and the Metaphysical Feminine PDF Author: Irene Han
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192666266
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Plato and the Metaphysical Feminine offers a new interpretation of the role of the female and the feminine in Plato's political dialogues—the Republic, Laws, and Timaeus—informed by Deleuze's film theory and Irigaray's psychoanalytic feminism. Irene Han reads Plato against the grain in order to close the gap between the vitalists and Plato, instead of magnifying their differences. Han explores the ambivalence that the vitalist tradition, Irigaray, and Derrida have towards Platonism. The application of Deleuzian and Irigarayan concepts to the ancient texts produces a new reading of Plato, focusing on the centrality and importance of motion, change, sensuality, and becoming to Platonic philosophy and, thereby, reinterprets Platonic philosophy in the direction of Heraclitus rather than Parmenides: as feminist rather than masculinist, and as mimetic. It therefore prioritizes Heraclitean principles of movement and flux over Form, the feminine over masculine, and materiality, feeling, or sensation over abstraction and universal essence. Han's exploration illustrates how, in Plato's thought, the feminine maps itself onto the plane of phenomena—a plane associated with vitalist themes such as motion, tactility, and change (metabolē). Platonic metaphysics is recontextualized by illustrating how Being expresses itself through processes of (feminine) becoming. With this reformulation, the resulting account of Platonic Being destabilizes any purported Platonic dualism.

One Hundred and One Nights: Plato and the Metaphysical Feminine

One Hundred and One Nights: Plato and the Metaphysical Feminine PDF Author: Irene Han
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
The twentieth-century has been dubbed the century of anti-Platonism by Badiou, a contemporary French philosopher. He identifies six strains of anti-Platonism: the vitalist, analytic, Marxist, existentialist, Heideggerian and "ordinary political philosophy." My research responds to these interpretations: in order to illustrate the dialectic between the past and present, I situate my work within the "affective turn," one of the currents in critical theory. In my dissertation "One Hundred and One Nights: Plato and the Metaphysical Feminine," I reassess Plato's stance towards the realm of becoming and see it as a feminine space, for the female body resides in his politics as the materialization of desire and the embodying of aspirations. It is with this approach that I make an intervention in the scholarly debate known as "Plato's Feminism:" I elucidate gendered spaces in the utopian paradigm and demonstrate that political discourses are gendered discourses. I look at the points of contact and disagreement among Plato's utopian dialogues, Republic, Laws and Timaeus, and, in my examination of the different textures of the ideal city, trace his gendered line of thought in the images, metaphors and analogies of the narrative. I use Deleuze's theory of cinema in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image as a hermeneutic model to locate the vital feminine principle of becoming, which I believe to be operative in the ancient texts. My work thus combines theoretical, literary and philological methodologies and is interested in an issue of enhancement: I proceed to show, by periodic demonstrations, that my philological answers verify the theoretical questions and categories that I pose as initiating them, that each depends upon and enhances the other. Ultimately what I try to magnify in Plato's thought is a double dichotomy, the bones and structure of binary oppositions: on the one hand, a set of neat micro-definitions, exemplified by the realm of the forms and the neutral, to kalon, for instance, and, on the other, the cacophony of muthoi, in other words, the realm of flux, language and meta-language. Because language is not pure--it is structured and manipulated, put under great stress since it expresses the world of appearance, and produces gendered bridges and divisions--Plato has to revert to fiction, noble lies and bodily metaphors to describe any reality, phenomenal or ideal. I focus on this vulnerability in Plato in his utopian dialogues and argue that he offers a theory of politics based on mime sis and an aesthetics of politics, made tangible by what I identify to be a cinematic narrative, which gives impressions of movement, time, fluidity and psychic contortions of all kinds. I take an interdisciplinary approach in order to show Plato not as a negative-polarity to the contemporary period but as a rather modern thinker, more than relevant to the present day.

Feminist Interpretations of Plato

Feminist Interpretations of Plato PDF Author: Nancy Tuana
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271040240
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description


Plato on the Metaphysical Foundation of Meaning and Truth

Plato on the Metaphysical Foundation of Meaning and Truth PDF Author: Blake E. Hestir
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316558827
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
What is the nature of truth? Blake E. Hestir offers an investigation into Plato's developing metaphysical views, and examines Plato's conception of being, meaning, and truth in the Sophist, as well as passages from several other later dialogues including the Cratylus, Parmenides, and Theaetetus, where Plato begins to focus more directly on semantics rather than only on metaphysical and epistemological puzzles. Hestir's interpretation challenges both classical and contemporary interpretations of Plato's metaphysics and conception of truth, and highlights new parallels between Plato and Aristotle, as well as clarifying issues surrounding Plato's approach to semantics and thought. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of ancient Greek philosophy, metaphysics, contemporary truth theory, linguistics, and philosophy of language.

Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics

Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics PDF Author: Hans Joachim Kramer
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438409648
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
This is a book about the relationship of the two traditions of Platonic interpretation -- the indirect and the direct traditions, the written dialogues and the unwritten doctrines. Kramer, who is the foremost proponent of the Tubingen School of interpretation, presents the unwritten doctrines as the crown of Plato's system and the key revealing it. Kramer unfolds the philosophical significance of the unwritten doctrines in their fullness. He demonstrates the hermeneutic fruitfulness of the unwritten doctrines when applied to the dialogues. He shows that the doctrines are a revival of the presocratic theory renovated and brought to a new plane through Socrates. In this way, Plato emerges as the creator of classical metaphysics. In the Third Part, Kramer compares the structure of Platonism, as construed by the Tubingen School, with current philosophical structures such as analytic philosophy, Hegel, phenomenology, and Heidegger. Of the five appendices, the most important presents English translations of the ancient testimonies on the unwritten doctrines. These include the "self-testimonies of Plato." There is also a bibliography on the problem of the unwritten doctrines.

Unity and Development in Plato's Metaphysics (RLE: Plato)

Unity and Development in Plato's Metaphysics (RLE: Plato) PDF Author: William Prior
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136236023
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Studies of Plato’s metaphysics have tended to emphasise either the radical change between the early Theory of Forms and the late doctrines of the Timaeus and the Sophist, or to insist on a unity of approach that is unchanged throughout Plato’s career. The author lays out an alternative approach. Focussing on two metaphysical doctrines of central importance to Plato’s thought – the Theory of Forms and the doctrine of Being and Becoming – he suggests a continuous progress can be traced through Plato’s works. He presents his argument through an examination of the metaphysical sections of six of the dialogues: the Euthyphro, Phaedo, Republic, Parmenides, Timaeus, and Sophist.

Studies in Plato's Metaphysics

Studies in Plato's Metaphysics PDF Author: Reginald E. Allen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415626323
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
Did Plato abandon, or sharply modify, the Theory of Forms in later life? In the Phaedo, Symposium, and Republicit is generally agreed that Plato held that universals exist. But in Parmenides, he subjected that theory to criticism. If the criticism were valid, and Plato knew so, then the Parmenidesmarks a turning point in his thought. If, however, Plato became aware that there are radical differences in the logical behaviour of concepts, and the later dialogues are a record of his attempt to analyse those differences, then Plato’s thought can be said to have moved in a new and vitally important direction after the Parmenides. Studies in Plato’s Metaphysicsbrings together twenty essays by leading philosophers from the UK and the USA reflecting upon this important issue and upon the questions arising from it.

The Female Drama

The Female Drama PDF Author: Charlotte C. S. Thomas
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780881467437
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Plato's most magisterial dialogue, the Republic, takes up the question "what is justice," and its central image is an imaginary city constructed in speech designed to aid in this inquiry. In Book V of the Republic, Socrates tells his interlocutors that they have completed the "Male Drama," of the city in speech and that it is now time for them to take up the "Female." The "Female Drama" is Socrates name for the action of the central books of the Republic: V-VII. Much has been made of what this transition in the Republic signifies for political questions. The Republic is not only concerned with politics or political justice, however. Like all of the images and arguments in the Republic, the Female Drama of the city in speech has meaning both for political and individual justice, but there has been no systematic inquiry into the central books of the Republic for their meaning for individual justice. That is the ambition of this book. On the level of moral psychology, Thomas argues that while the Male Drama of Books II-IV presents images of fully formed versions of the psychological activities that come together to define justice in a human life, the Female Drama explores the modes of potentiality and becoming necessary for those psychological activities to come into being. More specifically, Books V-VII explore the three modes of potentiality necessary for the development of justice: genesis, trophe, and paideia. Book jacket.

Women in Plato's Political Theory

Women in Plato's Political Theory PDF Author: Morag Buchan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415921848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Publisher description: This book examines the role of the female and the feminine in Plato's philosophy, and suggests that Plato's views on women are central to his political philosophy. Morag Buchan explores Plato's writings to argue his notions of the inferior female and the superior male. While Plato appears to allow women equal opportunity and participation of political life in the Ideal State in The Republic, his motivation rests on masculine ideals. Women in Plato's Political Theory examines issues including women's relationship to men, to reproduction, to rational thought and politics in Plato's work, and addresses more generally the problem of sexual identity in philosophy. This book is an important contribution toward a wider interpretation of Platonic philosophy.