William H.F. Altman

Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina
  •  2
    With both the Roman Empire and contemporary scholarship as backdrop, this book contrasts the Imperial Platonism of Plotinus with Plato's own by distinguishing one as a master enlightening disciples, and the other as an Athenian teacher who taught students to discover the truth for themselves in the Academy.
  • Reflecting with the Heidegger case
    In Gegory Fried (ed.), Confronting Heidegger: A Critical Dialogue on Politics and Philosophy, Rowman & Littlefield International. 2019.
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    In this book, William H. F. Altman turns to Demosthenes-universally regarded as Plato's student in antiquity-and Plato's other Athenian students in order to add external and historical evidence for Plato's original curriculum.
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    The relay race of virtue: Plato's debts to Xenophon
    State University of New York Press. 2022.
    Demonstrates that Plato and Xenophon ought to be regarded less as rivals and more as engaged in a dialogue advancing a common goal of preserving the Socratic legacy.
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    Socrates and Divine Revelation by Lewis Fallis
    Review of Metaphysics 72 (3): 597-598. 2019.
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    Rereading Xenophon’s Cyropaedia
    Ancient Philosophy 42 (2): 335-352. 2022.
    In suggesting that its last chapter’s purpose is to provoke the reader to begin reconsidering and thus rereading the book they have just read, this article attempts to negotiate the interpretive quarrel as whether Xenophon’s Cyropaedia deserves a “sunny” reading—in which Cyrus straightforwardly embodies Xenophon’s own political ideals—or a more critical “dark” one, that separates the author from his protagonist. To help us get the most advantage from the paideia his book was intended to provide,…Read more
  •  8
    Xenophon, the Old Oligarch, and Alcibiades
    Polis 39 (2): 261-278. 2022.
    Modifying the conjecture of Wolfgang Helbig by means of the distinction between Xenophon and his various narrators introduced by Benjamin McCloskey, this paper uses the insights of Hartvig Frisch to show how drawing a distinction between the first-person speaker in pseudo-Xenophon’s Constitution of the Athenians and its author indicates that the former is Alcibiades and the latter is Xenophon himself.
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    Xenophon and Plato’s Meno
    Ancient Philosophy 42 (1): 33-47. 2022.
    Not only was it a reference to Ismenias the Theban (Men. 90a4-5) that allowed nineteenth-century scholars to establish a date of composition for Plato’s Meno on the basis of Xenophon’s Hellenica but beginning with “Meno the Thessalian” himself, immortalized as a scoundrel in Xenophon’s Anabasis, each of the four characters in Plato’s dialogue is shown to have a Xenophontic resonance, thus revealing Meno to be Plato’s tombeau de Xénophon.
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    Tullia’s Secret Shrine
    Ancient Philosophy 28 (2): 373-393. 2008.
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    The purpose of this paper is to show that a reconstruction of “the reading order of Plato’s dialogues” can be used as the basis for a new kind of argument for the authenticity of dubia like Theages and Cleitophon.
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    This book is a study of Plato’s most elementary dialogues, arranged in relation to Reading Order as opposed to order of composition. Beginning with the theatrical Protagoras and reaching a mountaintop in Symposium, the dialogues between them—Alcibiades, Lovers, Hippias, Ion, and Menexenus—introduce the student to both philosophy and Platonism.
  •  3
    In order to move past the kind of thinking the author calls “post-War,” it is necessary to reassess the causes of the FirstWorld War. This chapter argues that German post-war cultural pessimism can only be understood adequately if we understand the justified anger and scorn for liberalism and modernity Germans felt at being assigned exclusive guilt for the Great War. He argues that this cultural pessimism can only be overcome if, on the basis of this understanding, we reassess the Western cultur…Read more
  •  16
    Parmenidean pedagogy in Plato's Timaeus
    Dissertatio 36 131-156. 2012.
    No livro Plato’s Philosophers, Catherine Zuckert olha para o Timeu de Platão de maneira renovada e revive implicitamente a tese de A. E. Taylor, segundo a qual Timeu não fala por Platão. Taylor devotou seu escrupuloso comentário de 1927 para construir esse argumento, o qual, porém, encalhou diante da questão colocada dez anos depois por F. M. Cornford, no livro Plato’s Cosmology : “Qual poderia ter sido o seu motivo?” O motivo de Platão era tanto pedagógico quanto parmenídico: assim como a deusa…Read more
  •  15
    Tarán’s case against the authenticity of Epinomis depends on the claim that it is incompatible with Plato’s Laws. Behind this claim is the uncritical assumption that the Athenian Stranger of Laws speaks for Plato. While the Athenian Stranger of Epinomis clearly does not do so, the same is equally true, albeit more difficult to detect, of the Stranger in Laws. Once the Athenian is recognized as both ambitious and impious, a reconstruction of the last sentence of Epinomis — on which Tarán’s incomp…Read more
  •  94
    In accordance with Leo Strauss’s ingenious suggestion, the Athenian Stranger of Plato’s Laws is best understood as an alternative ‘Socrates’, fleeing from the hemlock to Crete. Situated between Crito and Phaedo, Laws effectively tests the reader’s loyalty to the real Socrates who obeys Athenian law and dies cheerfully in Athens. Having separated Plato from the Stranger, a nuanced defence of Karl Popper’s suspicions about Laws confronts the apologetic readings of both Strauss and Christopher Bobo…Read more
  •  26
    Socrates and Divine Revelation (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 72 (3). 2019.
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    Altruism and the Art of Writing: Plato, Cicero, and Leo Strauss
    Humanitas: Interdisciplinary journal (National Humanities Institute) 22 (1): 69-98. 2009.
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    In accordance with Leo Strauss's ingenious suggestion, the Athenian Stranger of Plato's Laws is best understood as an alternative 'Socrates', fleeing from the hemlock to Crete. Situated between Crito and Phaedo, Laws effectively tests the reader's loyalty to the real Socrates who obeys Athenian law and dies cheerfully in Athens. Having separated Plato from the Stranger, a nuanced defence of Karl Popper's suspicions about Laws confronts the apologetic readings of both Strauss and Christopher Bobo…Read more
  • A Reply to Jeffrey Bernstein
    Interpretation 39 (3): 301-306. 2012.
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    The Alpine Limits of Jewish Thought: Leo Strauss, National Socialism, and Judentum ohne Gott
    Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 17 (1): 1-46. 2009.
    Writing in 1935 as "Hugo Fiala," Karl Löwith not only connected Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt to an apparently contentless "decisionism" but drew attention to the fact that his correspondent Leo Strauss had attacked Schmitt—like Heidegger an open Nazi since 1933— from the Right in 1932. In opposition to the views of Peter Eli Gordon, Heidegger's bellicose stance at the Davos Hochschule of 1929 is presented as "political" in Schmitt's sense of the term while Strauss's embrace of Heidegger, ne…Read more
  •  49
    Leo Strauss on ''German Nihilism'': Learning the Art of Writing
    Journal of the History of Ideas 68 (4): 587-612. 2007.
    The year Leo Strauss published "Persecution and the Art of Writing" (1941), he prepared a lecture ("German Nihilism") that he never published. An analysis of this lecture shows that Strauss hadn't fully mastered the art of writing he'd discovered in others: his secrets are too exposed. In the context of "German Nihilism," it becomes clear that "Persecution and the Art of Writing" is about liberal persecution of authoritarianism, no the reverse, as liberals would assume. In response to recent apo…Read more
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    Review Symposium of David Corey, The Sophists in Plato’s Dialogues: SUNY Press, 2015
    with Avi I. Mintz, Anne-Marie Schultz, Samantha Deane, Marina McCoy, and David D. Corey
    Studies in Philosophy and Education 37 (4): 417-431. 2017.
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    Recent Plato scholarship has grown increasingly comfortable with the notion that Plato’s art of writing brings his readers into the dialogue, challenging them to respond to deliberate errors or lacunae in the text. Drawing inspiration from Stanley Fish’s seminal reading of Satan’s speeches in Paradise Lost, this paper considers the narrative of Timaeus as deliberately unreliable, and argues that the actively critical reader is “the missing fourth” with which the dialogue famously begins. By cont…Read more