The Way of the Platonic Socrates

Product Description
Who is Socrates? While most readers know him as the central figure in Plato's work, he is hard to characterize. In this book, S. Montgomery Ewegen opens this long-standing and difficult question once again. Reading Socrates against a number of Platonic texts, Ewegen sets out to understand the way of Socrates. Taking on the nuances and contours of the Socrates that emerges from the dramatic and philosophical contexts of Plato's works, Ewegen considers questions of withdrawal, retreat, powerlessness, poverty, concealment, and release and how they construct a new view of Socrates. For Ewegen, Socrates is a powerful but strange and uncanny figure. Ewegen's withdrawn Socrates forever evades rigid interpretation and must instead remain a deep and insoluble question.
Review
In The Way of the Platonic Socrates, S. Montgomery Ewegen approaches the enigma of Socrates. Through the analysis of a broad array of Platonic texts, Ewegen investigates the philosophical implications of the Socratic posture and comes to an outcome paradoxical no less than fascinating, and genuinely Lacanian in tenor: a portrait outlining the ancient thinker in his lack and withdrawal, placelessness and spaciousness, in brief, in his abiding and generative mystery. -- Claudia Baracchi, Università di Milano-Bicocca
About the Author

S. Montgomery Ewegen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College. He is author of Plato's Cratylus: The Comedy of Language and translator (with Julia Goesser Assaiante) of Martin Heidegger's Heraclitus.