Towards a Polemical Ethics

Martin Heidegger held Plato responsible for inaugurating the slow slide of the West into nihilism and the apocalyptic crisis of modernity. In this book, Gregory Fried defends Plato against Heidegger’s critiques. While taking seriously Heidegger’s analysis of human finitude and historicity, Fried argues that Heidegger neglects the transcending ideals that necessarily guide human life as situated in time and place. That neglect results in Heidegger’s disastrous politics, unhinged from a practical reason grounded in the philosophical search from a truth that transcends historical contingency. Thinking both with and against Heidegger, Fried shows how Plato’s skeptical idealism provides an ethics that captures both the situatedness of finite human existence and the need for transcendent ideals. The result is a novel way of understanding politics and ethical life that Fried calls a polemical ethics, which mediates between finitude and transcendence by engaging in constructive confrontation with both traditions and other persons. The contradiction between the founding ideals of the United States and its actual history of racism and slavery provides an occasion to discuss polemical ethics in practice.

Fried addresses his and our own historical situatedness, in the 21st century, at certain moments in the book--for example, when alluding to the resurgent problem of fascism in our times, or to the Black Lives Matter movement and social unrest after the killing of George Floyd. In these ways the book brings together philosophical work on the meta-ethical significance of historical situatedness while remaining attuned to its own historical moment--an admirable achievement, and one worth looking to as a model for philosophical writing.-- "Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews", Gregory Fried's Toward a Polemical Ethics is an original piece of writing marked by two distinctive abilities. It shows the scholarly depth of a specialist attuned to the writings of Plato and Heidegger, but it also reflects the creative talents of a philosopher who directs his energies at grappling with problems that define our contemporary situation. This is a book that will require all of us to rethink our traditional understanding of Heidegger's writings on Plato.--Charles Bambach, professor of philosophy, University of Texas at Dallas, In Towards a Polemical Ethics: Between Heidegger and Plato, Gregory Fried accomplishes exactly what the title declares: he prepares us for the development of what, in his revised sense of the term, will be a polemical ethics by developing a space between Plato and Heidegger that is at once well-founded and richly speculative. At the same time, the book engages the reader in a similarly rich and friendly polemos.--Drew Hyland, Charles A. Dana professor of philosophy, Trinity College, Connecticut

Gregory Fried is professor of philosophy at Suffolk University. With Richard Polt he has translated Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics and Being and Truth, and edited A Companion to Heidegger’s “Introduction to Metaphysics” and Nature, History, State: 1933-1934.