Aristotle and the Invention of Platonism

Abstract

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 “misreader” 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.