Overview

Who is Socrates? While most readers know him as the central figure in Plato's work, he is hard to characterize. In this book, S. Montgomery Ewegen opens this long-standing and difficult question once again. Reading Socrates against a number of Platonic texts, Ewegen sets out to understand the way of Socrates. Taking on the nuances and contours of the Socrates that emerges from the dramatic and philosophical contexts of Plato's works, Ewegen considers questions of withdrawal, retreat, powerlessness, poverty, concealment, and release and how they construct a new view of Socrates. For Ewegen, Socrates is a powerful but strange and uncanny figure. Ewegen's withdrawn Socrates forever evades rigid interpretation and must instead remain a deep and insoluble question.

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9780253047564

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Adds to a vital and growing body of work dedicated to rethinking and reinterpreting one of the most, if not the most, important authors in Western philosophy and literature--Plato.--Jeremy Bell, editor of Plato's Animals By his own acknowledgement, Ewegen is not attempting in this stimulating book to definitively solve the issue of the way of the Platonic Socrates. What he does do is establish convincingly that one crucial but underestimated aspect of Socrates' way can be articulated by a congeries of terms that include: openness, receptivity, releasement, even weakness, passivity, withdrawal, and poverty, among others. This important book demonstrates insightfully that these themes have not received the attention they deserve.--Drew A. Hyland, Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Trinity College The Platonic Socrates presented in this extraordinary new work is not only, as the tradition has handed him down to us, poor, wandering, powerless, knowing only that he does not know, but also radically open, receptive, in withdrawal, less a thinker or questioner than a space for thinking and questioning that opens up the entire history of philosophy. By focusing on that space in the Platonic dialogues, Shane Ewegen has given us nothing less than a radically new Socrates.--Michael Naas, author of Plato and the Invention of Life Ewegen's book elaborates both on what it means for the Platonic Socrates to be somehow lacking and on the assorted ways in which Socrates' character is defined by it. It offers important insights into the highly enigmatic character of the Platonic Socrates and the philosophical significance thereof. This will become essential reading for anyone who takes Socrates' depiction in the dialogues to be philosophically relevant and for anyone interested in how Socrates creates the space in which philosophy can occur.--Sonja Tanner, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, author of Plato's Laughter In The Way of the Platonic Socrates, S. Montgomery Ewegen approaches the enigma of Socrates. Through the analysis of a broad array of Platonic texts, Ewegen investigates the philosophical implications of the Socratic posture and comes to an outcome paradoxical no less than fascinating, and genuinely Lacanian in tenor: a portrait outlining the ancient thinker in his lack and withdrawal, placelessness and spaciousness, in brief, in his abiding and generative mystery.--Claudia Baracchi, Universita di Milano-Bicocca

Author Information

S. Montgomery Ewegen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College. He is author of Plato's Cratylus: The Comedy of Language and translator (with Julia Goesser Assaiante) of Martin Heidegger's Heraclitus.

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