The Social from the Concept of Illusion in Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli and Bacon (Cinta de Moebio 28: 29-38, 2007)

The epistemological tradition set up by Plato has been permanently reading as a ‘way of doing philosophy’ in which the dualisms: reality versus illusion, on the one hand, and individual versus the social, on the other, would present not only in an explicit and incommensurable opposition to modern conceptions that assert the overcoming of such distinctions, but also as a monolithic bloc within which every new thing added seems to be no more than a “footnote” to that already said by the Greek philosopher. This work, offering a rereading of the notion of illusion in some authors of such a tradition (Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Francis Bacon), far from reaffirming the “mainstream” suggests that it is within the own Plato’s aegis in which the Platonic dualism begins to crack as a consequence of the permanent presence of the ‘social’.