Bücher von William H. F. Altman

Universally regarded as Plato's student in antiquity, it is the eloquent and patriotic orator Demosthenesnot the pro-Macedonian Aristotle who tutored Alexander the Greatwho returned to the dangerous Cave of political life, and thus makes it possible to recover the Old Academy. In Plato and Demosthenes: Recovering the Old Academy, William H. F. Altman explores how Demosthenesalong with Phocion, Lycurgus, and Hyperidesadd external and historical evidence for the hypothesis that Plato's brilliant and challenging dialogues constituted the Academy's original curriculum. Altman rejects the facile view that the eloquent Plato, a master speech-writer as well as the proponent of the transcendent and post-eudaemonist Idea of the Good, was rhetoric's enemy. He shows how Demosthenes acquired the discipline necessary to become a great orator, first by shouting at the sea and then by summoning the Athenians to self-sacrifice in defense of their waning freedom. Demosthenes thus proved Socrates' criticism of democracy and the democratic man wrong, just as Plato the Teacher had intended that his best students would, and as he continues to challenge us to do today.

This study reconsiders Plato's "Socratic" dialogues-Charmides, Laches, Lysis, Euthydemus, Gorgias, and Meno-as parts of an integrated curriculum. By privileging reading order over order of composition, a Platonic pedagogy teaching that the Idea of the Good is a greater object of philosophical concern than what benefits the self is spotlighted.

If you've ever wondered why Plato staged Timaeus as a kind of sequel to Republic, or who its unnamed missing fourth might be; or why he joined Critias to Timaeus, and whether or not that strange dialogue is unfinished; or what we should make of the written critique of writing in Phaedrus, and of that dialogue's apparent lack of unity; or what is the purpose of the long discussion of the One in the second half of Parmenides, and how it relates to the objections made to the Theory of Forms in its first half; or if the revisionists or unitarians are right about Philebus, and why its Socrates seems less charming than usual, or whether or not Cratylus takes place after Euthyphro, and whether its far-fetched etymologies accomplish any serious philosophical purpose; or why the philosopher Socrates describes in the central digression of Theaetetus is so different from Socrates himself; then you will enjoy reading the continuation of William H. F. Altman's Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lexington; 2012), where he considers the pedagogical connections behind ';the post-Republic dialogues' from Timaeus to Theaetetus in the context of ';the Reading Order of Plato's dialogues.'

When careful consideration is given to Nietzsche's critique of Platonism and to what he wrote about Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, and to Germany's place in ';international relations' (die Groe Politik), the philosopher's carefully cultivated ';pose of untimeliness' is revealed to be an imposture. As William H. F. Altman demonstrates, Nietzsche should be recognized as the paradigmatic philosopher of the Second Reich, the short-lived and equally complex German Empire that vanished in World War One. Since Nietzsche is a brilliant stylist whose seemingly disconnected aphorisms have made him notoriously difficult for scholars to analyze, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is presented in Nietzsche's own style in a series of 155 brief sections arranged in five discrete ';Books,' a structure modeled on Daybreak. All of Nietzsche's books are considered in the context of the close and revealing relationship between ';Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche' (named by his patriotic father after the King of Prussia) and the Second Reich. In ';Preface to ';A German Trilogy,'' Altman joins this book to two others already published by Lexington Books: Martin Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral Oration and The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism.

Leo Strausss connection with Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt suggests a troubling proximity to National Socialism but a serious critique of Strauss must begin with F. H. Jacobi. While writing his dissertation on this apparently Christian opponent of the Enlightenment, Strauss discovered the tactical principles that would characterize his lifework: writing between the lines, a faith-based critique of rationalism, the deliberate secularization of religious language for irreligious purposes, and an all or nothing antagonism to middling solutions. Especially the latter is distinctive of his Zionist writings in the 1920s where Strauss engaged in an ongoing polemic against Cultural Zionism, attacking it first from an orthodox, and then from an atheists perspective. In his last Zionist article (1929), Strauss mentions the Machiavellian Zionism of a Nordau that would not fear to use the traditional hope for a Messiah as dynamite. By the time of his change of orientation, National Socialism was being led by a nihilistic Messiah while Strauss had already radicalized Schmitts political theology and Heideggers deconstruction of the ontological Tradition. Central to Strausss advance beyond the smartest Nazis is his Second Cave in which he claimed modern thought is imprisoned: only by escaping Revelation can we recover natural ignorance. By using pseudo-Platonic imagery to illustrate what anti-Semites called Jewification, Strauss attempted to annihilate the common ground, celebrated by Hermann Cohen, between Judaism and Platonism. Unlike those who attacked Plato for devaluing nature at the expense of the transcendent Idea, the emigre Strauss effectively employed a new Plato who was no more a Platonist than Nietzsche or Heidegger had been. Central to Strausss Platonic political philosophy is the mysterious protagonist of Platos Laws whom Strauss accurately recognized as the kind of Socrates whose fear of death would have caused him to flee the hemlock. Any reader who recognizes the unbridgeable gap between the real Socrates and Plato's Athenian Stranger will understand why ';the German Stranger' is the principal theoretician of an atheistic re-enactment of religion, of which genus National Socialism is an ultra-modern species.