Philological Interlude

Chapter 3 is a short interlude. It deals with the novelty of Paul Friedländer’s philological approach to Plato’s dialogues and shows how his insights were decisive in the subsequent philosophical attempts to move beyond Heidegger’s attack against Platonism. Friedländer’s originality consists of a brilliant attempt to bridge the philosophical and literary dimensions of Plato’s writings and thus to propose an interpretation of the philosophical meaning of the dialogical form of philosophy. I show that the three key features found by Friedländer – anti-dogmatism, irony, and ineffability – all have a significant role to play in post-Heideggerian Platonism, but that these had to be further developed philosophically by Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger.