Lire les dialogues, mais lesquels et dans quel ordre ?

The essays collected here consider the history of the interpretations and uses of Platonic philosophy from the perspective of the interdependence between exegesis and the definition of the corpus. The aim is not to retrace the history of Platonism, nor of the Platonic corpus, but to study the configuration of the corpus in the context of a given hermeneutic (ancient or modern), and to think through what unites them.

Several central questions structure this approach : the determination of works as authentic and the degrees of exclusion ; the different classifications of the works, of which chronology is merely one figure ; the definition of an order of reading, which does not necessarily coincide with the supposed order of writing.


These questions have received and continue to provoke a variety of responses, each of which are choices that reflect or demand an interprétation.

What emerges is an image of Platonism as a process of recomposition, by the exegete, of the corpus he or she has inherited.