ONLINE FIRST
published on April 26, 2023
Drew A. Hyland
https://doi.org/10.5840/jcp202342043
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 ¡°Pla?to¡¯s metaphysics,¡± his ¡°epistemology,¡± his ¡°moral theory,¡± his ¡°political theory¡± etc.) are not so much discovered in the dialogues as they are in?vented 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.