"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"--.

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Translations
• Preface
• Introduction
  • Towards a Polemical Ethics
  • Between Heidegger and Plato
  • The ‘and’ Between Heidegger and Plato: Hermeneutical Considerations
  • Wonder, Question, and Response
  • At Issue: The Particular and the Universal in Being-Human
  • Heidegger and Polemos
  • Glossary of Key Terms
• 1. Between Earth and Sky
  • 1.1 Philosophy as Absolute Freedom
  • 1.2 The Strife between Earth and World
  • 1.3 The Flight of Icarus
  • 1.4 Sun and Soil
  • 1.5 Construals of Meaning
• 2. Back to the Cave
  • 2.1 Heidegger’s Cave: Freedom under Fire
  • 2.2 Truth and Freedom
  • 2.3 The Charge of Nihilism
  • 2.4 Socratic Zeteticism
  • 2.5 Socratic Piety, Socratic Trust, Socratic Phenomenology
  • 2.6 Zetetic Piety in the Republic: Pledging Troth to the Idea
  • 2.7 The Polemic between Zetetic and Echonic Philosophy
  • 2.8 Back to the Cave
• 3. Seeing Sun and Shadow
  • 3.1 Visionary Knowing
  • 3.2 The Sun and the Divided Line as Images for Knowledge
  • 3.3 The Idea of the Good
  • 3.4 The Wraith of the Name on the Divided Ring
• 4. Breaking Down in the Cave
  • 4.1 The Geography of the Cave
  • 4.2 Breakdown and Traumatic Rupture
  • 4.3 Healing from the Breakdown
  • 4.4 Philosophers Misfired
• 5. Ideation and Reconstruction
  • 5.1 Lighting the Way on the Upward Path
  • 5.2 Ideation and Socratic Phenomenology
  • 5.3 Out of the Cave: The Echonic Vision
  • 5.4 Transcendence Deferred: Preconstruction as Envisioning
• 6. The Compulsion of the Body
  • 6.1 Our Bodies, Our Cave3
  • 6.2 The Return: Reconstruction as Reintegration of the Line
  • 6.4 One’s Own and the Body Politic
  • 6.5 The Confrontation of Ideation and Materiality
  • 6.6 Ideal and Illusion
• 7. At the Crossroads of the Cave
  • 7.1 The Lateral Path
  • 7.2 Artifacts and Unintentional Poiēsis
  • 7.3 Historicity and the Crossing of the Pathways
  • 7.4 Sophistry and Philosophy at the Crossroads of the Cave
  • 7.5 The Upward Path
• 8. Retrieving Phronēsis
  • 8.1 Heidegger’s Polemics of Phronēsis
  • 8.2 Essential Politics
  • 8.3 Antigone and the Polis as Essential Tragedy
  • 8.4 Antigone and the Polis as the Site of Polemical Phronēsis
  • 8.5 Retrieving Phronēsis
  • 8.6 Examples of Phronēsis in Ethical Life
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index