The Platonic Epistles and Fanaticism in the History of Philosophy: Meiners, Tiedemann, and Kant

Abstract

summary:

In the early controversy over the Platonic Epistles, a certain type of argument for inauthenticity gained popularity: the character of Plato we find in them is unbefitting a philosopher, so the letters must be later forgeries. Despite the known limitations of this argument type, historians of philosophy in the late eighteenth century gradually extended its use to cases in which “Plato” seems to be a fanatic (Schwärmer), a contemporary slur leveled by sober professionals against amateur philosophers pretending to revelation. Given the shortcomings of this kind of argument from character, I aim to account for its popularization by placing it within larger disciplinary trends. Unlike other reasons for doubting authenticity (such as anachronism, inconsistency, and contradiction), the argument from character allows the critic to editorialize about philosophical norms. Accordingly, arguing from character in the context of the Epistles became a means of responding to Kant’s critical philosophy. This paper thus argues that a bad argument for the inauthenticity of the Platonic Epistles proliferated because it was useful for a proxy war over how to do philosophy in the context of a nascent and professionalizing discipline, the history of philosophy.