Plato's Stranger

<p><b>Meditation on the character of the Eleatic Stranger in Plato's late dialogues arguing that the prominent place afforded to this foreigner-the other-represents an important philosophical and political legacy regarding the way thought and life in the community is understood.</b></p><p>The dramatic introduction in two of Plato's late dialogues-the <i>Sophist</i> and the <i>Statesman</i> both part of a trilogy that also includes the <i>Theaetetus</i>-of a stranger the Eleatic Stranger who replaces Socrates is a consequential move especially since it occurs in the context of decidedly new insights into the philosophical <i>logos</i> and life together in a community. The introduction of a radical stranger a stranger to all native identity has theoretical implications and rather than a rhetorical or merely literary device is of the order of an argument. <i>Plato's Stranger</i> argues that in these late dialogues Plato bestows on the West a philosophical and political legacy at the core of which the stranger holds a prominent place because it provides the foreigner-the other-with a previously unheard-of constitutive role in the way thinking as well as life in community is understood. What is to be learned from these late dialogues is that without a constitutive relation to otherness discursive and political life in a community-in other words also of the way one relates to oneself-remain lacking.</p>