Modernity and Plato: Two Paradigms of Rationality

by Arbogast Schmitt, Vishwa Adluri (Translator)

Sets itself the Herculean task of comparing and reconciling the modern and Platonic concepts of rationality.

Modernity's break with the Middle Ages is distinguished by a comprehensive turn to a world of individual, empirical experience, a turn that was a repudiation of Plato's idea that there is a reality of rationality and intellect. Yet already in the Renaissance it was no longer thought necessary to seriously confront the "old" concept of rationality that emanates from Plato. Arbogast Schmitt's book sets itself this until-now-unfulfilled task, comparing the arguments for a life based on theory and one based on praxis in order to provide a balance sheet of profit and loss. Showing that the Enlightenment did not, as often assumed, discover rationality, but instead a different concept of rationality, the book opens one's view to other forms of rationality and new possibilities of reconciliation with one's own - that is, Western - history.
Modernity and Plato was hailed upon its publication in Germany (2003, revised 2008) as "one of the most important philosophy books of the past few years," as "a book that belongs, without any doubt, in the great tradition of German philosophy," and as "a provocative thesis on the antiquity-modernity debate." It is a major contribution to synthetic philosophy and philosophical historiography, in English for the first time.

Arbogast Schmitt is Honorary Professor at the Institute for Greek and Latin Philology at Free University, Berlin and Emeritus Professor of Classical Philology and Greek at the University of Marburg, Germany. Vishwa Adluri teaches in the Departments of Religion and Philosophy at Hunter College, City Universityof New York.

Genres: Philosophy

634 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2012

Reviews

[Madame · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent thesis about modernity's prejudice and contempt for Ancient and Medieval thought. The climax is the part on emotions and feelings, which he shows are not separate from thought but defendant on it. Every modern should read this book.

[Edward Butler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Modernity and Plato is a groundbreaking work, and the kind of text rarely translated in its entirety, for which we have to thank the extraordinary efforts of its translator, Vishwa Adluri. Most translators will focus their effort on reports of new research, rather than on a wide ranging but closely argued interpretive text such as this, with the power to transform completely our perspective upon "antiquity" and "modernity".

It would certainly be as much as one would expect from a book of this length to reorient our interpretation of the essential import of Platonism, as this book does through its patient insistence that the insight guiding the whole Hellenic philosophical tradition beginning from Parmenides is that "only something that is some one thing is cognizable," (p. 58). But Schmitt goes on to provide, in addition, a comprehensive historical and metaphysical critique of modernity's self understanding and of its key intellectual moments, as well as sketches of how a renewed understanding of the Platonic and Aristotelian legacy could help to chart a course beyond impasses of modernity in several critical areas.

In the face of such a work, any criticism based upon narrower concerns and preoccupations seems less than relevant. What matters, I would say, is for specialists in any of the fields treated in this book, as well as any who would engage in serious discourse deploying the global category of "modernity", to absorb Schmitt's argument and allow it to inform their own projects.

[Narcis Tasca · Rating 5 out of 5]

perhaps Schmitt's best book..