Abstract

Plato’s constant reservations concerning art from the moral and political point of view have to some extent concealed the aesthetic dimension of his analyses of art and helped to consolidate the idea that there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a Platonic aesthetics. We wish to contest the latter view and to show that Plato, without considering aesthetics as an autonomous philosophical sphere, does develop a theory of sensibility and recognizes the specificity of aesthetic pleasure and judgement as well as the specificity of the relation between art and reality. We will thus have proven that there is indeed a Platonic aesthetics.