Sets itself the Herculean task of comparing and reconciling the modern and Platonic concepts of rationality.

Modernity's break with the Middle Ages is distinguished by a comprehensive turn to a world of individual, empirical experience, a turn that was a repudiation of Plato's idea that there is a reality of rationality and intellect. Yet already in the Renaissance it was no longer thought necessary to seriously confront the 'old' concept of rationality that emanates from Plato. Arbogast Schmitt's book sets itself this until-now-unfulfilled task, comparing the arguments for a life based on theory and one based on praxis in order to provide a balance sheet of profit and loss. Showing that the Enlightenment did not, as often assumed, discover rationality, but instead a different 'concept' of rationality, the book opens one's view to other forms of rationality and new possibilities of reconciliation with one's own - that is, Western - history. 'Modernity and Plato' was hailed upon its publication in Germany (2003, revised 2008) as 'one of the most important philosophy books of the past few years, ' as 'a book that belongs, without any doubt, in the great tradition of German philosophy, ' and as 'a provocative thesis on the antiquity-modernity debate.' It is a major contribution to synthetic philosophy and philosophical historiography, in English for the first time. Arbogast Schmitt is Honorary Professor at the Institute for Greek and Latin Philology at Free University, Berlin and Emeritus Professor of Classical Philology and Greek at the University of Marburg, Germany. Vishwa Adluri teaches in the Departments of Religion and Philosophy at Hunter College, City University of New York.

This collection of essays offers an overview of the range and breadth of Platonic philosophy in the early modern period. It examines philosophers of Platonic tradition, such as Cusanus, Ficino, and Cudworth. The book also addresses the impact of Platonism on major philosophers of the period, especially Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Shaftesbury and Berkeley.

Plato's Ghost is the first book to examine the development of mathematics from 1880 to 1920 as a modernist transformation similar to those in art, literature, and music. Jeremy Gray traces the growth of mathematical modernism from its roots in problem solving and theory to its interactions with physics, philosophy, theology, psychology, and ideas about real and artificial languages. He shows how mathematics was popularized, and explains how mathematical modernism not only gave expression to the work of mathematicians and the professional image they sought to create for themselves, but how modernism also introduced deeper and ultimately unanswerable questions. Plato's Ghost evokes Yeats's lament that any claim to worldly perfection inevitably is proven wrong by the philosopher's ghost; Gray demonstrates how modernist mathematicians believed they had advanced further than anyone before them, only to make more profound mistakes. He tells for the first time the story of these ambitious and brilliant mathematicians, including Richard Dedekind, Henri Lebesgue, Henri Poincaré, and many others. He describes the lively debates surrounding novel objects, definitions, and proofs in mathematics arising from the use of naïve set theory and the revived axiomatic method—debates that spilled over into contemporary arguments in philosophy and the sciences and drove an upsurge of popular writing on mathematics. And he looks at mathematics after World War I, including the foundational crisis and mathematical Platonism. Plato's Ghost is essential reading for mathematicians and historians, and will appeal to anyone interested in the development of modern mathematics.

Acclaimed philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein provides a dazzlingly original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden role in today's debates on religion, morality, politics, and science.

In his native Italy Augusto Del Noce is regarded as one of the preeminent political thinkers and philosophers of the period after the Second World War. The Crisis of Modernity makes available for the first time in English a selection of Del Noce's essays and lectures on the cultural history of the twentieth century. Del Noce maintained that twentieth-century history must be understood specifically as a philosophical history, because Western culture was profoundly affected by the major philosophies of the previous century such as idealism, Marxism, and positivism. Such philosophies became the secular, neo-gnostic surrogate of Christianity for the European educated classes after the French Revolution, and the next century put them to the practical test, bringing to light their ultimate and necessary consequences. One of the first thinkers to recognize the failure of Marxism, Del Noce posited that this failure set the stage for a new secular, technocratic society that had taken up Marx’s historical materialism and atheism while rejecting his revolutionary doctrine. Displaying Del Noce's rare ability to reconstruct intellectual genealogies and to expose the deep metaphysical premises of social and political movements, The Crisis of Modernity presents an original reading of secularization, scientism, the sexual revolution, and the history of modern Western culture.

“PLATO IS GENERALLY regarded as the most brilliant speculative mind the West has produced. Some philosophers have preferred the greater patience and methodical procedure of Aristotle, Aquinas, or more recent analytic philosophy; others have argued that the Platonic vision did not do justice to our intuitions of duration and existence; but no one will ever deny the continuing inspiration that Western philosophy has gained from Plato....”—Prof. Robert S. Brumbaugh, Introduction Originally published in 1962 and the first comprehensive work of its kind since Alfred Edward Taylor’s Plato in 1908, Professor Robert S. Brumbaugh’s Plato for the Modern Age represents a one-volume introduction to Plato’s biography and includes a complete account of his works. Plato for the Modern Age, like Plato’s life and works, is divided into three major periods: a youthful commitment to philosophical inquiry and its defense, a mature systematic vision, and a final careful criticism and application of the system Plato had envisaged. For each of these main periods, Prof. Brumbaugh first introduces Plato at different stages of his career, and provides an account of the dialogues he wrote: the characters who enact these dramatic intellectual conversations and confrontations, the theme they explore with its major variations, and “some internal evidence that our biographical notions are correct in assumptions such as that a visit to Tarentum would have led to new confidence in mathematics, one to Syracuse to less confidence in unprincipled dictatorship.” Plato for the Modern Age was designed as an introductory text for the beginner student of philosophy, and it will also greatly appeal to the general reader.