Journal of Continental Philosophy

published on April 26, 2023

Aristotle and the Invention of Platonism

The guiding suggestion of this article is intimated in the title: “Platonism,” that set of “philosophical positions” supposedly present in the Platonic dialogues (pre-eminently the “theory of forms,” but also “Pla­to’s metaphysics,” his “epistemology,” his “moral theory,” his “political theory” etc.) are not so much discovered in the dialogues as they are in­vented out of a very specific (mis) reading of those dialogues. And the first great “mis-reader” was Aristotle, who, I argue, first made possible the set of assumptions about philosophy and about philosophic writing that, in turn, made anything like “Platonism” possible.