Antifoundationalism and Plato's Phaedo

Bibliographic Data

ID10433486
AuthorsPaul Stern (corresponding author)
Year1989
Volume51
Issue2
Pages190-217
Publication date1989-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Review of Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-6705 • E-ISSN: 1748-6858
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0034670500048087
OpenAlexW2155668136
LanguageEN
References cited24

The claim made by antifoundationalist thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and more recently Richard Rorty is that the search for a standard or foundation for our moral and political judgments inevitably arrives at a distorting reductivism. This radical claim, if true, makes dubious the very possibility of political philosophy understood as the rational investigation of human affairs. A response to this claim which merely adduces the potentially harmful consequences of such a view is inadequate; our manifest need for such a standard in no way guarantees the existence of such a standard. An adequate response requires that we meet the premise of the antifoundationalist view. That premise resides in a certain understanding of Platonic thought, an understanding which I here undertake to show is mistaken

Epistemology · Foundation (evidence · Law and economics · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Premise · Sociology · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Law · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

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