Almost two-and-a-half millennia have passed since the mythical prisoner of Plato's Republic first stumbled bleary-eyed from the ancient screening room of the cave to gaze upon the brilliance of the sun. Yet it is today, in our so-called ‘postmodern’ world – a world in which Plato has supposedly been ‘overturned’, in which truth finds itself on equal footing with opinion – that we need more than ever to turn to those principles underlying Platonism: to the foundational role of mathematics, to the ‘supreme genera’ of Ideas, to the possibility of real thought (outside of the calculable machinations of constituted knowledges); in a word, to the possibility of novel and disruptive truths.

While it was for Plato imperative that the prisoner become a philosopher only after he had escaped the shadow-world of the cave and gazed upon the sun, contemporary doxa effectively holds that the philosopher is born as such in the cave, for if he knows anything it is that there is no sun to speak of, only an endless expanse of darkness.