Search results for ""author monique dixsaut""

This book uncovers in the works of Plato and Nietzsche, not some royal road to truth, but rather the intensity of their love and commitment to the life of thought, whatever it discovers and wherever it might lead. Plato explored this in his ubiquitous absence from the adventures of thought depicted in his Dialogues. Nietzsche followed suit with his unrelenting presence as the grim and forceful conscience behind all the masks through which he spoke in his chaotic oeuvre. It is not a matter of biography or of shared doctrine, some favourite thoughts by which their lesser exegetes can keep them in their respective stables and move on to others with other favourite thoughts. To discover Plato and Nietzsche's kinship required something more, an intensive, lifelong philosophical engagement that Monique Dixsaut's students witnessed in her teaching at the Sorbonne, now available in English via this translation, which is suitable for academics, intellectuals and general readers alike. The `other way’ to philosophise proves to be the practice of philosophy itself.

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In this penetrating and graceful analysis, Monique Dixsaut reveals that the project of Plato's dialogues is to "invent the philosopher" in a sense the term never again had. The dialogues show, by dramatic and dialectical instantiation, that a person seeking truth engenders a coherent system intended to determine what is. Since one cannot judge a path until he has taken it to the end, this "science of free men" comes upon truth and acquires intelligence; the ideas develop from a thinking that desires to think in a different way, without asking whether this is possible. One who thinks in this way does not have to become a philosopher. He is one, and can only know what that means because he already is one. For him, intelligence supersedes logic, desire is more compelling than duty, pleasure signals hierarchy more strongly than values, and the fact of finding, seeing, and becoming more inventive guarantees truth more surely than conforming to method. Dixsaut's treatment is fundamental, yet unique. For those who love the dialogues of Plato, this book will help them understand why in a profound new sense.

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