Was Plato A Platonist?

Abstract

My paper will pose the seemingly rather trivial question – was Plato a Platonist? and it will demonstrate that it is possibly not as trivial as it first appears to be. Thus, the definition of “Platonism” becomes an issue – particularly as regards the understanding of the concept of “idea” and its constitution: is it to be understood in a realistic manner giving the idea (or quite generally, the object) total independence of the subject conceiving it? Or is some other conception possible? And then we have Plato’s metaphor of re-membering getting into the core of what philosophizing means. As memory and all the functions of consciousness related to it thus come into the field of interrogation, this might give rise to a phenomenological interpretation of what happens in the constitution of the idea-object. This might, of course, seem problematic in regard to the traditional conception of Plato, but the traditional conception might also be questioned, and my paper will do exactly that. In this way the phenomenological field of problems and possibilities – the constitutional together with history and the understanding of history – will come into focus so that the problem of Platonism and Plato becomes “originally” reflected and interrogated upon this grounding.