Towards a Polemical Ethics: Between Heidegger and Plato
Apr 2021 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Ebook
320
Pages
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About this ebook
Martin Heidegger held Plato responsible for inaugurating the slow slide of the West into nihilism and the apocalyptic crisis of modernity. In this book, Gregory Fried defends Plato against Heidegger’s critiques. While taking seriously Heidegger’s analysis of human finitude and historicity, Fried argues that Heidegger neglects the transcending ideals that necessarily guide human life as situated in time and place. That neglect results in Heidegger’s disastrous politics, unhinged from a practical reason grounded in the philosophical search from a truth that transcends historical contingency.
Thinking both with and against Heidegger, Fried shows how Plato’s skeptical idealism provides an ethics that captures both the situatedness of finite human existence and the need for transcendent ideals. The result is a novel way of understanding politics and ethical life that Fried calls a polemical ethics, which mediates between finitude and transcendence by engaging in constructive confrontation with both traditions and other persons. The contradiction between the founding ideals of the United States and its actual history of racism and slavery provides an occasion to discuss polemical ethics in practice.
Thinking both with and against Heidegger, Fried shows how Plato’s skeptical idealism provides an ethics that captures both the situatedness of finite human existence and the need for transcendent ideals. The result is a novel way of understanding politics and ethical life that Fried calls a polemical ethics, which mediates between finitude and transcendence by engaging in constructive confrontation with both traditions and other persons. The contradiction between the founding ideals of the United States and its actual history of racism and slavery provides an occasion to discuss polemical ethics in practice.
About the author
Gregory Fried is professor of philosophy at Boston College. He is the author of Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics. With Richard Polt, he has translated Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics and Being and Truth as well as edited A Companion to Heidegger’s “Introduction to Metaphysics” and Nature, History, State: 1933–1934. He is cofounder and director of the Mirror of Race Project (mirrorofrace.bc.edu). With his father, Charles Fried, he is author of Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror.
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