Gadamer's Path to Plato ― A Response to Heidegger and a Rejoinder by Stanley Rosen

This book investigates the formative years of Hans-Georg Gadamer's Plato studies, while studying with Martin Heidegger at Marburg University. It outlines the evolution of Heidegger's understanding of Plato, explains why his hermeneutical phenomenology inspired Gadamer, and, why his argument that Plato was responsible for Western civilization's forgetting the meaning of existence was a provocation. Heidegger's argument that Plato is an ontological dualist was crucial to the development of Gadamer's understanding of Plato. The book thus puts forward an argument for Gadamer's having indirectly refuted Heidegger's Plato. This involves re-examination of the relationship between Plato and Aristotle in matters of ethics, physics and truth. Above all, however, it is Gadamer's concept of Platonic dialectic that questions Heidegger's belief that Plato is a metaphysician. This challenge to Heidegger's Plato was commensurate with the origination of Gadamer's positive hermeneutical philosophy. In order to testthe alleged openness of that philosophy to the other as other Gadamer's reading of the Republic is scrutinized by using the brilliant scholarship of Stanley Rosen. An examination of their interpretation of the Republic includes an inquiry into their intellectual influences. For Gadamer these include Hegel, the Teubingen school and Jacob Klein: for Rosen, the poetic genius of Leo Strauss. Rosen's mathematical and poetic orientation is then compared to Gadamer's dialectical approach to interpreting Plato. The mathematical approach dovetails with a theory of human nature and procedural rationalism in Gadamer's hermeneutical philosophy that explains why he, in contrast to Rosen, bypasses important dimensions of the Republic such as the significance of speakers and settings to understanding the text. This methodological shortcoming in turn calls into question the truth of Gadamer's method and with it, the foundations of a truly open and pluralist society--Publisher info.