Provocative Form in Plato, Kant, Nietzsche (and Others)

The Author: Bernard Freydberg, author of The Play of the Platonic Dialogues (Peter Lang, 1997) and Imagination and Depth in Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' (Peter Lang, 1994), is Professor of Philosophy at Slippery Rock University. His work seeks to liberate untapped resources in the history of philosophy, especially Greek and German.

"In this wonderful book, Bernard Freydberg engages the question of form. Ranging across the entire history of philosophy from the early Greeks to recent Continental philosophy, he interrogates form in a way no less radical than that in which in his previous books he interrogated imagination and play. Freydberg proposes a fundamental reorientation: form is to be regarded not only as intelligible form, but also as it belongs to the sensible, to action, even to pleasure and as it provokes and is grasped by imagination. Indeed, he demonstrates that form, properly conceived, is precisely what allows things to show themselves in their questionableness. Throughout his analyses and interpretations, Freydberg displays a remarkable talent for letting what seems obvious be overtaken by a provocative strangeness that shatters the obviousness and compels a renewal of questioning." (John Sallis, Pennsylvania State University)
"In unusually lucid readings of certain texts by Plato, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and Nietzsche, Bernard Freydberg focuses on the special problem of form in the history of Western philosophy. I was stunned by Freydberg's creative new insights into a renewed dialectic of form exemplified in the provocative relations between 'seeing' and 'thinking'... More important, perhaps, his brilliant analysis...demonstrates the passionate nature of philosophical conversation even today."
(Wilhelm Wurzer, Duquesne University)