Brill's Companion to German Platonism

401 Pages·2019·2.779 MB·English

by  Alan Kim (editor)

Brill’s Companion to German Platonism
Brill’s Companions to Philosophy
Ancient Philosophy
Edited by
Kyriakos N. Demetriou (Cyprus University)
volume 3
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bcpa
Brill’s Companion to
German Platonism
Edited by
Alan Kim
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Western Sea by Lyonel Feininger. Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts,
Springfield, Massachusetts. James Philip Gray Collection. Photography by David Stansbury.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kim, Alan, 1968– editor.
Title: Brill’s companion to German Platonism / edited by Alan Kim.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2019. | Series: Brill’s companions to
 philosophy. Ancient philosophy, ISSN 2588-7823, volume 3 |
 Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018049822 (print) | LCCN 2018054158 (ebook) |
 ISBN 9789004285163 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004250673 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, German. | Plato—Influence. | Platonists.
Classification: LCC B2528.G73 (ebook) | LCC B2528.G73 B75 2019 (print) |
 DDC 141/.20943—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049822
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 2588-7823
isbn 978-90-04-25067-3 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-28516-3 (e-book)
Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors viii
1 Introduction 1
Alan Kim
2 Plato and the Platonic Tradition in the Philosophy of Nicholas
of Cusa 15
Claudia D’Amico
3 Leibniz: The Last Great Christian Platonist 43
Jack Davidson
4 The Infinitesimal Calculus of the Soul: Moses Mendelssohn’s
Phädon 76
Bruce Rosenstock
5 Kant and Plato: An Introduction 109
Manfred Baum
6 Hegel’s Plato: A New Departure 131
Jere O’Neill Surber
7 Schleiermacher on Plato: From Form (Introduction to Plato’s Works)
to Content (Outlines of a Critique of Previous Ethical Theory) 146
André Laks
8 Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Theory of the Platonic Dialogue and
Its Legacy 165
Thomas Alexander Szlezák
9 Plato’s Conception of Time at the Foundation of Schopenhauer’s
Philosophy 192
Robert Wicks
10 Plato-Reception in the Marburg School 217
Karl-Heinz Lembeck
vi Contents
11 Nietzsche and Plato 249
Richard Bett
12 Phenomenological Platonism: Husserl and Plato 271
Alan Kim
13 Heidegger’s Ambiguous and Unfinished Confrontation with Plato 299
Francisco J. Gonzalez
14 The Tübingen School 328
Vittorio Hösle
15 Form and Language: Gadamer’s Platonism 349
François Renaud
Index of Pre-Modern Authors and Notables (born before 1500) 379
Index of Modern Authors and Notables 381
Index of Subjects 384
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Prof. Kyriakos Demetriou of Cyprus University, the series
editor, for his patient guidance. I have also received valuable advice, help and
encouragement from various friends over the years: Stephen Menn of McGill;
at Dartmouth, Amy Allen (now of Penn State); and at Stony Brook, Eduardo
Mendieta (now also of Penn State), Allegra de Laurentiis, Jeff Edwards, and
Lee Miller.
Plato criticized writing for leaving one’s thought vulnerable to misconstruc-
tion. An editor would therefore seem to have a special responsibility towards
the defenseless writings placed in his care, namely to make them as fine as
possible before sending them forth into the world. In trying to fulfill this duty,
I discovered an unexpected and unique privilege: when failing to understand
something, I was able simply to ask the writer where I had gone astray and rea-
sonably expect an answer—ὥστε μοι σχεδόν τι πᾶς ὁ λόγος γέγραπται (Theaetetus
143a). Thus, the relationship between editor and writer, I have found, may elude
Plato’s critique, and hold reading and writing within the bounds of philosophi-
cal χάρις. I thank my collaborators for their ideas and patient “defenses”.
Notes on Contributors
Manfred Baum
is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal. He
is the former President of the Internationale Kant-Gesellschaft and co-editor
of Kant Studien. In addition to many articles, he is the author of two books:
Deduktion und Beweis in Kants Transzendentalphilosophie. Untersuchungen zur
Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Athenäum, 1986) and Die Entstehung der Hegelschen
Dialektik (Bouvier, 1986; 2nd ed., 1989). He has also co-edited the Gesammelte
Schriften of Klaus Reich (Meiner, 2001) and Volume v of Hegel’s Gesammelte
Werke (Meiner, 1998).
Richard Bett
is Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Johns Hopkins University. His
work has been especially in the area of ancient Greek skepticism. He is the
author of Pyrrho, his Antecedents, and his Legacy (Oxford, 2000) and of sev-
eral translations, with explanatory notes or commentary, of works of the Greek
skeptic Sextus Empiricus. He has also published articles on Plato, Socrates, the
Sophists, the Stoics, and Nietzsche.
Claudia D’Amico
is Professor of History of Medieval Philosophy at the University of Buenos
Aires and the University of La Plata, Argentina; a Principal Researcher of the
National Council for the Promotion of Science and Technology (CONICET);
Director of the Program of Studies on the Reception of Platonism—Institute of
Philosophy. She is a member of several scientific societies and adviser (Beirat)
to the Scientific Committee of the Cusanus-Gesellschaft of Trier, Germany.
Since 1998 she has directed the Círculo de Estudios Cusanos of Buenos Aires,
and since 2011 has presided over the Ibero-American Society of Neoplatonism.
Her area of specialization is Medieval Neoplatonism with special attention to
the philosophy of Nicolas of Cusa and his sources, on which subjects she has
published extensively.
Jack Davidson
is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Theology,
Philosophy, and Classical Languages at Texas Lutheran University. He special-
izes in Early Modern philosophy and has published on Aristotle, Descartes,
Locke, and Leibniz. His current research interests involve free will in the Early
Modern period and its medieval antecedents.
Notes on Contributors ix
Francisco J. Gonzalez
is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa, Canada. His publica-
tions include Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato’s Practice of Philosophical Inquiry
(Northwestern, 1998) and Plato and Heidegger: A Question of Dialogue (Penn
State, 2009), in addition to numerous articles in journals and collections in the
areas of Ancient and Contemporary Continental philosophy. He has also edited
The Third Way: New Directions in Platonic Studies (Rowman and Littlefield,
1995) and co-edited Plato and Myth: Studies on the Use and Status of Platonic
Myths (Brill: 2012). Currently he is working on Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle.
Vittorio Hösle
is the Paul Kimball Professor of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre
Dame and teaches in the departments of German, Philosophy and Political
Science. The core of his work is the historical study and systematic appropria-
tion of the tradition of objective idealism.
Alan Kim
teaches Greek thought at SUNY-Stony Brook. He is the author of Plato in
Germany: Kant—Natorp—Heidegger (International Plato Society/Academia,
2010). He has published in Phronesis, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, and
elsewhere, and is currently writing a book on Socratic ethics.
André Laks
retired from the University of Paris-Sorbonne, is currently teaching at the
Universidad Panamericana in Mexico City and at Princeton University. His
main publications bear on Plato (Médiation et coercition. Pour une lecture des
Lois de Platon, 2005) and the Presocratics (Diogène d’Apollonie. Edition, tra-
duction et commentaire des fragments et des témoignages, 22008; The Concept
of Presocratic philosophy, 2018). In 2017, together with Glenn W. Most, he co-
edited the nine-volume series on Early Greek Philosophy for the Loeb Classical
Library, and its French equivalent, Les débuts de la philosophie. Des premiers
penseurs Grecs à Socrate (Fayard).
Karl-Heinz Lembeck
is Professor for Theoretical Philosophy at the Universität Würzburg. His
research focuses on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy,
publishing chiefly in phenomenology and classical transcendental philoso-
phy. His most important publications include: Philosophie als Zumutung?
Ihre Rolle im Kanon der Wissenschaften (Philosophy as Imposition? Its Role