Postmodern Platos

This study examines the work of five key philosophical figures from the 19th and 20th centuries through the lens of their own decidedly postmodern readings of Plato. The author argues that Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss and Derrida, convinced that modern rationalism had exhausted its possibilities, all turned to Plato in order to rediscover the original character of philosophy and to reconceive the Western tradition as a whole. Zuckert's juxtaposition of these seemingly disparate bodies of thought furnishes a synoptic view, not merely of these individual thinkers, but of the broad postmodern landscape as well. The result is a work that offers a perspective on the relation between the Western philosophical tradition and the evolving postmodern enterprise.