The Tübingen School

chapter 14 The Tübingen School Vittorio Hösle Among so many interpretative approaches to Plato, as far as I can see, only one has been named after the town where it was developed: the Tübingen School.1 On the one hand, this is certainly due to the fact that the approach did not convince the whole community of Plato scholars; in fact, it has remained rela- tively isolated and was met, particularly in the Anglo-American world, mainly with skepticism if not outright hostility. On the other hand, the toponymic designation is an honor: unlike, say, the analytic approach to Plato, the new approach did not spread diffusely among many people but was the achieve- ment of a handful of scholars who worked as colleagues in the same small German university town, a town the importance of which for the development of early German Idealism and historical-critical theology is known across the world. The originality of the approach is thus comparatively much higher; and although originality is no warrant of truth, bold new conceptions deserve admiration even from those who do not accept them. At the end of his long critical review of the work of Krämer that inaugurated the school—a review to which I will return—Gregory Vlastos called attention to those entirely admirable qualities which make this book a remark- able performance: vigor of argument, boldness of conception, breadth 1 It is sometimes called the “Tübingen-Milan School”, since Giovanni Reale (1931–2014), who taught at the Università Cattolica in Milan, further developed the ideas of Krämer and Gaiser; his book Per una nuova interpretazione di Platone (Reale 1984) is the most exhaustive pre- sentation of Plato’s philosophy taking into account the unwritten doctrines. I will, however, have to ignore Reale and his pupils’ (especially Maurizio Migliori’s and Giancarlo Movia’s) important contribution, since the present volume is dedicated to the German reception of Plato. In France, Marie-Dominique Richard is closest to the Tübingen School. I can only mention the work, Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines (Findlay 1974), by the South African philosopher and vigorous critic of Wittgenstein, John Niemeyer Findlay (1903–1987). While published after the works of Krämer and Gaiser, Findlay developed his interpretation of Plato long before its publication and the rise of the Tübingen School. The astonishing convergence between his and the Tübingen approach is the more striking as there was no reciprocal influence. His book offers an English translation of the main documents concern- ing the esoteric doctrines (Findlay 1974, 413–54). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004285163_015 The Tübingen School 329 of vision. Had K. done no more for us than challenge us to free ourselves from σμικρολογία, he would still have placed us greatly in his debt.2 The application of small-mindedness to the study of great philosophers has considerably proliferated in the last half-century, certainly not to the benefit of philosophy and probably not even to that of historiographical work; and the challenge of freeing oneself from it has correspondingly increased. It is my hope that even those who remain unconvinced by several claims of the Tübingen School recognize the challenge that motivated it, the ingenuity of its solution, and its potentially far-reaching importance for the history of philosophy in general, beyond the issue of the correct interpretation of Plato. I will, first, investigate why there is so little consensus today regarding the correct interpretation of Plato (i); second, explain which problems and phil- ological discussions led to the emergence and articulation of the Tübingen School as a complex answer to the question of how to correctly interpret Plato (ii); and, third, discuss some of the arguments against it, as well as several external causes that prevented its general acceptance (iii). I Hardly any other philosopher has in the course of history elicited more different interpretations than Plato, and even today Plato scholars disagree on the most basic issues. Note that I am not speaking here about the evaluation of Plato’s theories; I am referring to the simple issue of the ascription of certain doctrines to Plato, independently of whether one agrees with them or not. The reasons for this lack of consensus are at least six. (1) Plato’s interests were as universal as perhaps only those of Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel. There are not many scholars who are equally competent in, say, the history of the philosophy of mathematics and the history of political philosophy, and inevitably they will focus on different features of Plato’s philosophy, even when they are reading the same book, such as the Republic. While their different selections will lead to different results, these need not logically contradict each other; but a widespread tendency to ascribe one’s own core interests to the object of one’s research easily transforms such differences into incompatibilities. (2) Plato is the first to articulate many philosophical problems, from the issue of how to define knowledge to the ontological status of mathematical objects. Since the freshness of the first discovery of a problem 2 Vlastos (1963), 655..

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