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Philosophy Phenomenology

Plato's Animals

Gadflies, Horses, Swans, and Other Philosophical Beasts

edited by Jeremy Bell

contributions by Michael Naas, Christopher Long, Claudia Baracchi, Sara Brill, S. Montgomery Ewegen, Francisco Gonzalez, H. Peter Steeves, Drew A. Hyland, David Farrell Krell, Marina McCoy, Holly Moore, Heidi Northwood & Thomas Thorp

Publisher
Indiana University Press
Initial publish date
May 2015
Category
Phenomenology, Essays
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780253016171
    Publish Date
    May 2015
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780253016133
    Publish Date
    May 2015

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

Plato's Animals examines the crucial role played by animal images, metaphors, allusions, and analogies in Plato's Dialogues. These fourteen lively essays demonstrate that the gadflies, snakes, stingrays, swans, dogs, horses, and other animals that populate Plato's work are not just rhetorical embellishments. Animals are central to Plato's understanding of the hierarchy between animals, humans, and gods and are crucial to his ideas about education, sexuality, politics, aesthetics, the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and philosophy itself. The volume includes a comprehensive annotated index to Plato's bestiary in both Greek and English.

About the authors

Jeremy Bell's profile page

Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. His research covers the fields of philosophy and comparative literature, with a particular focus on ancient Greek thought and contemporary French philosophy and with a strong interest in the thinkers Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, and Levinas. He has edited and co-translated into English a number of Jacques Derrida’s texts: The Work of Mourning (2011), Learning to Live Finally (2007), Rogues (2005), and Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas (1999). His most recent publications are The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques
Derrida’s Final Seminar (2015), Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (2012), and Plato and the Invention of Life (2018).

Michael Naas' profile page

Christopher Long's profile page

Claudia Baracchi's profile page

Sara Brill's profile page

S. Montgomery Ewegen's profile page

Francisco Gonzalez's profile page

H. Peter Steeves is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Humanities Center at DePaul University. He is the author of several books, including Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life (SUNY Press, 1999), The Things Themselves: Phenomenology and the Return to the Everyday (SUNY Press, 2006), and Beautiful, Bright, and Blinding: Phenomenological Aesthetics and the Life of Art (SUNY Press, 2017).

H. Peter Steeves' profile page

Drew A. Hyland's profile page

David Farrell Krell's profile page

Marina McCoy's profile page

Holly Moore's profile page

Heidi Northwood's profile page

Thomas Thorp's profile page

Editorial Reviews

Remarkable.33.2 2016

Polis

Plato's Animals is a strong volume of beautifully written paeans to postmodern themes found in premodern thought.

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews