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Martin Heidegger held Plato responsible for inaugurating the slow slide of the West into nihilism and the apocalyptic crisis of modernity. In this book, Gregory Fried defends Plato against Heidegger's critiques. While taking seriously Heidegger's analysis of human finitude and historicity, Fried argues that Heidegger neglects the transcending ideals that necessarily guide human life as situated in time and place. That neglect results in Heidegger's disastrous politics, unhinged from a practical reason grounded in the philosophical search from a truth that transcends historical contingency. Thinking both with and against Heidegger, Fried shows how Plato's skeptical idealism provides an ethics that captures both the situatedness of finite human existence and the need for transcendent ideals. The result is a novel way of understanding politics and ethical life that Fried calls a polemical ethics, which mediates between finitude and transcendence by engaging in constructive confrontation with both traditions and other persons. The contradiction between the founding ideals of the United States and its actual history of racism and slavery provides an occasion to discuss polemical ethics in practice.
Gregory Fried is professor of philosophy at Suffolk University. With Richard Polt he has translated Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics and Being and Truth, and edited A Companion to Heidegger's "Introduction to Metaphysics" and Nature, History, State: 1933-1934.
Acknowledgements Abbreviations and Translations Preface: Address to the Reader Introduction: Towards a Polemical Ethics Chapter 1. Between Earth and Sky: The Polemics of Finitude and Transcendence Chapter 2. Back to the Cave: From Heidegger to Plato Chapter 3. Seeing Sun and Shadow: The Metaphorics of Vision in the Cave Chapter 4. Breaking Down in the Cave Chapter 5. Ideation and Reconstruction: Healing from the Bonds of the Cave Chapter 6. The Compulsion of the Body Chapter 7. At the Crossroads of the Cave Chapter 8. Retrieving Phronesis: Antigone at the Heart of Ethics Chapter 9. Conclusion: Towards Enacting a Polemical Ethics
