Do we ‘actually communicate’? All but the most frighteningly alienated among us know that the answer is uncontroversially yes. Apart from routine success buying bread and getting a turn in the shower, most of us have experienced deep and powerful moments of contact, virtually transparent understanding, with members of our own or another species. When you start to think about how this happens, though, you pretty quickly realize that there is much for which Newtonian physics cannot account. (Either that, or you reject your phomen[o]logical experience in order to save Newton.—And perhaps it is a surprising capacity for such a rejection that is selected for by institutional philosophy.) Plato’s metaphysics is indeed strange; it may, in the end, be unworkable. But it represents a direct and sincere attempt to save fundamental—and, to our culture, fundamentally mysterious—phenomena.

Jan Zwicky, Plato as Artist