misReading Plato Continental and Psychoanalytic Glimpses Beyond the Mask

This book reorients the scholarship on Plato by returning readers to his most fundamental insights and reflections on the nature of the human psyche and the human condition. By approaching the dialogue anew, as if for the first time, the book creates new intellectual pathways by opening the conversation to a clash of ideas. The contributors offer nuanced, nontraditional readings of Plato, readings that not only analyze but also build on the dialogues by bringing them into conversation with psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and contemporary continental thought more broadly. It addresses a major gap in the literature caused by reading Plato as a metaphysician or moral or political philosopher and not, primarily, as a psychologist. Psychologists and scholars in philosophy, psychoanalysis, Platonic thought, and other humanities-related disciplines will find this new approach to Plato refreshing, accessible, and uniquely innovative.

Foreword: The Parodic Plato John Panteleimon Manoussakis 1. The Multiplicity of Man: Beyond the Postmodern Matthew Clemente 2. Farrago: Mythos and Logos in Plato's Phaedrus Bryan J. Cocchiara 3. Plato at the Opera: The Sounds of Philosophia Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn 4. True Lies: A Defense of the Sophists Simon Critchley 5. Blinded by Desire: Self-Deception and the Possibility of the True Lie in Plato's Republic Stephen Mendelsohn 6. Philosophical "Descent": Between the Philosopher and the Other Melissa Fitzpatrick 7. "Halt!": Socrates, Levinas, and the Divine Sign Eric R. Severson 8. Ignorance, Flattery, and Dialectic: Philosophical Rhetoric in Plato's Gorgias Christine Rojcewicz 9. Being & Seeming: On Socractes' Ontological Humiliation of the Sophists William J. Hendel 10. The Noble Taboo: Homoerotic Desire and Philosophic Inquiry Andrew J. Zeppa 11. Division and Proto-Racialism in the Statesman John D. Proios 12. Hunting in Plato: On Noticing Donald N. Boyce 13. The Philosophical Poet and the Poetic Philosopher M. Saverio Clemente in Dialogue with Richard Kearney 14. In Search of the Natural Beginning A Conversation with Stephen Mendelsohn and John Sallis 15. Plato's Final Dialogue David Roochnik 16. Who is the Philosopher King? Jean-Luc Beauchard

Matthew Clemente is a husband and father of five. He lives and writes in Boston, Massachusetts, where he holds teaching appointments at Boston College and Boston University. He has published seven books, most recently Eros Crucified: Death, Desire, and the Divine in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Religion, and is the assistant editor of the Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion. Bryan J. Cocchiara is currently an adjunct professor of philosophy at Brookdale Community College. He received his MA from Boston College in 2014, where he was a research fellow at the Lonergan Institute. He received his STM from Drew University in 2021, where he specialized in philosophical and theological studies in religion. He is the co-editor of misReading Nietzsche (Pickwick Publications, 2018). William J. Hendel is a teaching fellow at Boston College, who specializes in ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and contemporary continental philosophy.