Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault (Classical Memories/Modern Identities)

Miller, Dr. Paul Allen

ISBN 10: 0814210708 / ISBN 13: 9780814210703

Published by Ohio State University Press, 2007

About this Item

The book is in good condition with all pages and cover intact, including the dust jacket if originally issued. The spine may show light wear. Pages may contain some notes or highlighting, and there might be a "From the library of" label. Boxed set packaging, shrink wrap, or included media like CDs may be missing.

Seller Inventory # BSM.198CJ

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault (Classical Memories/Modern Identities)
• Publisher: Ohio State University Press
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814210708
• ISBN 13: 9780814210703
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: good

About this title

Synopsis

Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, by Paul Allen Miller, argues that a key element of postmodern French intellectual life has been the reception of Plato. This fact has gone underappreciated in the Anglophone world due to a fundamental division in culture. Until very recently, the concerns of academic philosophy and philology have had little in common. On the one hand, this is due to analytic philosophy’s self-confinement to questions of epistemology, speech act theory, and philosophy of science. As such, it has had little to say about the relation between antique and contemporary modes of thought.
On the other hand, blindness to the merits of postmodern thought is also due to Anglo-American philology’s own parochial instincts. Ensconced within a nineteenth-century model of Alterumswissenschaft, only a minority of classicists have made forays into philosophical, psychoanalytic, and other speculative modes of inquiry. The result has been that postmodern French thought has largely been the province of scholars of modern languages. 
A situation thus emerges in which most classicists do not know theory, and so cannot appreciate the scope of these thinkers’ contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of Western thought, while most theorists do not know the Platonic texts and their contexts that ground them. This book bridges this gap, offering detailed and theoretically informed readings of French postmodernism’s chief thinkers’ debts to Plato and the ancient world.

About the Author

Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina.