Heidegger and His Platonic Critics

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This Element introduces the arguments of three prominent Platonic critics of Heidegger – Leo Strauss (1899–1973), Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), and Jan Patočka (1907–1977) – with the aim of evaluating the trenchancy of their criticisms. The author shows that these three thinkers uncover novel ways of reading Plato non-metaphysically (where metaphysics is understood in the Heideggerian sense) and thus of undermining Heidegger's narrative concerning Platonism as metaphysics and metaphysics as Platonism. In their readings of the Platonic dialogues, Plato emerges as a proto-phenomenologist whose attention to the ethical-political facticity of human beings leads to the acknowledgment of human finitude and of the fundamental elusiveness of Being. These Platonic critics of Heidegger thus invite us to see in the dialogues a lucid presentation of philosophic questioning rather than the beginning of distorting doctrinal teachings.