Overview

An original account of Western metaphysics based on Plato’ s Parmenides At the end of Plato's Parmenides, Parmenides concludes that 'whether' the One is or is not, it and 'the Others' both are and are not, and both appear and do not appear, all things in all ways. Throughout the history of philosophy various attempts have been made to make sense of Plato's puzzling dialectical exercise. In this ambitious book Andrew Cutrofello shows how Kant and Hegel extended it, how contemporary philosophers, including Graham Priest and Alain Badiou, have reinterpreted it, and how poets such as Dante, Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, and Susan Howe have channeled it. What emerges is an original conception of the history of metaphysics as a series of antinomies, and of metaphysical poetry as a type of antinomianism.

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9780810149380

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Reviews

""The One and the Others is an impressive, lively retelling of the history of Western philosophy as a series of attempts to resolve the paradoxes identified in Plato's Parmenides. Cutrofello provides a sympathetic and original examination of an extraordinary range of figures, both philosophical and literary, connecting each figure with one of the hypotheses Parmenides explores with the young Socrates in that dialogue. This book leaves us with an exciting, if dizzying picture of the history of metaphysics as a never-ending oscillation between a fixed number of intrinsically unstable positions."" - Mark Alznauer, Northwestern University

The One and the Others is an impressive, lively retelling of the history of Western philosophy as a series of attempts to resolve the paradoxes identified in Plato's Parmenides. Cutrofello provides a sympathetic and original examination of an extraordinary range of figures, both philosophical and literary, connecting each figure with one of the hypotheses Parmenides explores with the young Socrates in that dialogue. This book leaves us with an exciting, if dizzying picture of the history of metaphysics as a never-ending oscillation between a fixed number of intrinsically unstable positions."" - Mark Alznauer, Northwestern University

Author Information

Andrew Cutrofello is a professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. His previous books include Imagining Otherwise: Metapsychology and the Analytic A Posteriori, published by Northwestern University Press, and All for Nothing: Hamlet's Negativity.

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