Main description:

* Offers nuanced, non-traditional readings of Plato
* Builds upon the dialogues by bringing them into conversation with psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and contemporary Continental thought more broadly
* Addresses a major gap in the literature, one which has been perpetuated down through the centuries; a gap caused by reading Plato as a metaphysician or moral or political philosopher and not, primarily, as a psychologist, a doctor of the human soul

Contents:

Part 1: Aesthetics as First Philosophy 1. The Multiplicity of Man: Beyond the Postmodern 2. Farrago: Mythos and Logos in Plato's Phaedrus 3. Plato at the Opera: The Sounds of Philosophia 4. True Lies: A Defense of the Sophists Part 2: The Ethics of Desire 5. Blinded by Desire: Self-Deception and the Possibility of the True Lie in Plato's Republic 6. Philosophical "Descent": Between the Philosopher and the Other 7. "Halt!": Socrates, Levinas, and the Divine Sign 8. Ignorance, Flattery, and Dialectic: Philosophical Rhetoric in Plato's Gorgias Part 3: The Desire of Ethics 9. Being & Seeming: On Socractes' Ontological Humiliation of the Sophists 10. The Noble Taboo: Homoerotic Desire and Philosophic Inquiry 11. Division and Proto-Racialism in the Statesman 12. Hunting in Plato: On Noticing 13. The Philosophical Poet and the Poetic Philosopher 14. In Search of the Natural Beginning 15. Plato's Final Dialogue 16. Who is the Philosopher King?