Antifoundationalism and Plato's Phaedo

Abstract

The claim made by antifoundationalist thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and more recently Richard Rorty is that the search for a standard or foundation for our moral and political judgments inevitably arrives at a distorting reductivism. This radical claim, if true, makes dubious the very possibility of political philosophy understood as the rational investigation of human affairs. A response to this claim which merely adduces the potentially harmful consequences of such a view is inadequate; our manifest need for such a standard in no way guarantees the existence of such a standard. An adequate response requires that we meet the premise of the antifoundationalist view. That premise resides in a certain understanding of Platonic thought, an understanding which I here undertake to show is mistaken.