The One and the Others

An original account of Western metaphysics based on Plato’s Parmenides

At the end of Plato’s Parmenides, Parmenides concludes that “whether ‘the One’ is or is not, it and ‘the Others’ both are and are not, and both appear and do not appear, all things in all ways.” Throughout the history of philosophy various attempts have been made to make sense of Plato’s puzzling dialectical exercise. In this ambitious book Andrew Cutrofello shows how Kant and Hegel extended it, how contemporary philosophers, including Graham Priest and Alain Badiou, have reinterpreted it, and how poets such as Dante, Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, and Susan Howe have channeled it. What emerges is an original conception of the history of metaphysics as a series of antinomies, and of metaphysical poetry as a type of antinomianism.