UPDATE: The Ontology of Socratic Questioning has won the 2013 Symposium Book Award of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy. Congratulations Sean!

The APS is happy to call your attention to the appearance of Sean Kirkland’s The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato’s Early Dialogues with the SUNY University Press.

This study offers an encompassing (because fundamental) re-interpretation of the philosophical project of Socrates as depicted in Plato’s early dialogues. Throughout the works generally deemed early and authentic, the author finds a fairly uniform presentation of Socratic philosophizing, but one which upon careful review requires a radical new interpretation. Indeed, departing at the most basic level from orthodox approaches to these works,The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato’s Early Dialogues does greater justice to the Platonic text, often going deeply into the etymological complexities and various resonances of Plato’s Greek. And precisely in so doing, it allows these ancient works to speak illuminatingly to one of the most central philosophical issues with which we find ourselves confronted in our present historical moment—how to think philosophically beyond the subject/object relation. Over the course of these chapters, Socratic questioning proves to be aimed at the being of virtue conceived as something other than objective reality and it proves to be undertaken by a philosophizing self conceived as something other than a subject.

Please join us in congratulating Sean on this accomplishment.