Books by William H. F. Altman

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.

Based on a conception of Reading Order introduced and developed in his Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lexington; 2012) and The Guardians in Action: Plato the Teacher and the Post-Republic Dialogues from Timaeus to Theaetetus (Lexington; 2016), William H. F. Altman now completes his study of Plato's so-called ';late dialogues' by showing that they include those that depict the trial and death of Socrates. According to Altman, it is not Order of Composition but Reading Order that makes Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Crito, and Phaedo ';late dialogues,' and he shows why Plato's decision to interpolate the notoriously ';late' Sophist and Statesman between Euthyphro and Apology deserves more respect from interpreters. Altman explains this interpolationand another, that places Laws between Crito and Phaedoas part of an ongoing test Plato has created for his readers that puts ';the Guardians on Trial.' If we don't recognize that Socrates himself is the missing Philosopher that the Eleatic Stranger never actually describesand also the antithesis of the Athenian Stranger, who leaves Athens in order to create laws for Cretewe pronounce ourselves too sophisticated to be Plato's Guardians, and unworthy of the Socratic inheritance.

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.'

Less than two years before his murder, Cicero created a catalogue of his philosophical writings that included dialogues he had written years before, numerous recently completed works, and even one he had not yet begun to write, all arranged in the order he intended them to be read, beginning with the introductory Hortensius, rather than in accordance with order of composition. Following the order of the De divinatione catalogue, William H. F. Altman considers each of Cicero's late works as part of a coherent philosophical project determined throughout by its author's Platonism. Locating the parallel between Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Cicero's ';Dream of Scipio' at the center of Cicero's life and thought as both philosopher and orator, Altman argues that Cicero is not only ';Plato's rival' (it was Quintilian who called him Platonis aemulus) but also a peerless guide to what it means to be a Platonist, especially since Plato's legacy was as hotly debated in his own time as it still is in ours. Distinctive of Cicero's late dialogues is the invention of a character named ';Cicero,' an amiable if incompetent adherent of the New Academy whose primary concern is only with what is truth-like (veri simile); following Augustine's lead, Altman shows the deliberate inadequacy of this pose, and that Cicero himself, the writer of dialogues who used ';Cicero' as one of many philosophical personae, must always be sought elsewhere: in direct dialogue with the dialogues of Plato, the teacher he revered and whose Platonism he revived.

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.

In a new approach to a vexing problem in modern philosophy, William H. F. Altman shows that Heidegger's decision to join the Nazis in 1933 can only be understood in the context of his complicated relationship with the Great War.

In this unique and important book, William Altman shines a light on the pedagogical technique of the playful Plato, especially his ability to create living discourses that directly address the student. Reviving an ancient concern with reconstructing the order in which Plato intended his dialogues to be taught as opposed to determining the order in which he wrote them, Altman breaks with traditional methods by reading Plato's dialogues as a multiplex but coherent curriculum in which the Allegory of the Cave occupies the central place. His reading of Platos Republic challenges the true philosopher to choose the life of justice exemplified by Socrates and Cicero by going back down into the Cave of political life for the sake of the greater Good.