010351 VO Contemporary Philosophy (2021S)

The treatment of Plato in twentieth century philosophy turns out to be less clear-cut than it might seem at first glance. Certainly, an anti-Platonism prevails, which is shared by such different schools of thought as existential philosophy, logical empiricism, Marxism, and poststructuralism. However, there are also significant approaches that draw affirmatively on Plato and make him productive for their own concerns. The lecture will reconstruct and discuss some of these approaches. The scope ranges from phenomenologists such as Husserl and Patočka to postmodern authors such as Deleuze, Foucault, Levinas and solitary thinkers such as Strauss, Weil, Whitehead. The lecture will conclude with the more recent references to Plato by Badiou and Žižek.
The lecture seeks to elaborate what makes Plato relevant to contemporary thought.
The lecture is divided into 70 minutes of lecture and 20 minutes for questions and discussion.