Plato's Animals
Gadflies, Horses, Swans, and Other Philosophical Beasts
- 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
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).
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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).
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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