This book reorients the scholarship on Plato by returning readers to his most fundamental insights, reflections on the nature of the human psyche, and the human condition.

Matthew Clemente is a husband and father of five. He lives and writes in Boston, Massachusetts, where he holds teaching appointments at Boston College and Boston University. He has published seven books, most recently Eros Crucified: Death, Desire, and the Divine in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Religion, and is the assistant editor of the Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion.

Bryan J. Cocchiara is currently an adjunct professor of philosophy at Brookdale Community College. He received his MA from Boston College in 2014, where he was a research fellow at the Lonergan Institute. He received his STM from Drew University in 2021, where he specialized in philosophical and theological studies in religion. He is the co-editor of misReading Nietzsche (Pickwick Publications, 2018).

William J. Hendel is a teaching fellow at Boston College, who specializes in ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and contemporary continental philosophy.

Part 1: Aesthetics as First Philosophy 1. The Multiplicity of Man: Beyond the Postmodern 2. Farrago: Mythos and Logos in Plato's Phaedrus 3. Plato at the Opera: The Sounds of Philosophia 4. True Lies: A Defense of the Sophists Part 2: The Ethics of Desire 5. Blinded by Desire: Self-Deception and the Possibility of the True Lie in Plato's Republic 6. Philosophical "Descent": Between the Philosopher and the Other 7. "Halt!": Socrates, Levinas, and the Divine Sign 8. Ignorance, Flattery, and Dialectic: Philosophical Rhetoric in Plato's Gorgias Part 3: The Desire of Ethics 9. Being & Seeming: On Socractes' Ontological Humiliation of the Sophists 10. The Noble Taboo: Homoerotic Desire and Philosophic Inquiry 11. Division and Proto-Racialism in the Statesman 12. Hunting in Plato: On Noticing 13. The Philosophical Poet and the Poetic Philosopher 14. In Search of the Natural Beginning 15. Plato's Final Dialogue 16. Who is the Philosopher King?