I. HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The Political Implications of Heidegger's Reading of the Allegory of the Cave Georgios Petropoulos (University College Dublin School of Philosophy) Abstract This paper draws a link between Heidegger's reading of Plato's allegory of the cave and his support for the National Socialist regime during the early 30's. Three interrelated suggestions are made: (1) That Heidegger's reading of the allegory of the cave is informed by his preoccupation with the imminent threat of nihilism. (2) That Heidegger's interpretation radicalizes his critique of the public sphere to the effect that it renders the latter irredeemable. (3) That the unbridgeable gap between philosophy and the public sphere commits Heidegger to the anticipation of a catastrophic event that will open up the possibility of genuine freedom. Keywords: Heidegger;and more recently Francesco Gonzalez,4 agree that Heidegger downgrades the ontological insights of Plato's philosophy and focuses only on the epistemological ones, which he happens to criticize. Robert Dostal locates a tension between Heidegger's remarks about Plato's epekeina tes ousias in his early Marburg lectures and in his 1942 essay on Plato's Doctrine of Truth. Whereas in the Marburg lectures Plato's suggestion that Being is epekeina tes ousias is understood by Heidegger as pointing in the direction of a genuine encounter with Being as such, in his 1942 essay Plato's phrase is absent. According to Dostal, this absence is indicative of Heidegger's interpretation of Plato as the father of epistemology and the metaphysics of subjectivity.5 Dostal's argument for the downgrading of the ontological in Plato is correct as