Antoine Pageau-St Hilaire - Böcker

Heidegger criticized Plato, alleging that all metaphysics is Platonism and that metaphysics is a misunderstanding and falsification of the question of Being. Is it possible to defend Platonism against this Heideggerian accusation? Three thinkers among Heidegger's first generation of students answered this question affirmatively, and appropriated Platonic philosophy in order to respond to Heidegger's critique and to criticize his thought more broadly. Antoine Pageau-St-Hilaire examines the Platonic critiques of Heidegger found in the works of Leo Strauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Gerhard Krüger in the context from which they emerged, namely the intellectual constellation of Marburg as shaped by Marburg neo-Kantian Platonism and the philological innovations of Paul Friedländer. His rich study illuminates neglected aspects of the reception of Plato in the German tradition, and presents a new narrative of developments in post-Heideggerian thought.

This Element introduces the arguments of three prominent Platonic critics of Heidegger - Leo Strauss (1899-1973), Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), and Jan Patočka (1907-1977) - with the aim of evaluating the trenchancy of their criticisms. The author shows that these three thinkers uncover novel ways of reading Plato non-metaphysically (where metaphysics is understood in the Heideggerian sense) and thus of undermining Heidegger's narrative concerning Platonism as metaphysics and metaphysics as Platonism. In their readings of the Platonic dialogues, Plato emerges as a proto-phenomenologist whose attention to the ethical-political facticity of human beings leads to the acknowledgment of human finitude and of the fundamental elusiveness of Being. These Platonic critics of Heidegger thus invite us to see in the dialogues a lucid presentation of philosophic questioning rather than the beginning of distorting doctrinal teachings.