Forthcoming in Hylomorphism: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Volume 15, edited by Gyula Klima and Alexander Hall (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). What Has Aquinas Got Against Platonic Forms? Turner C. Nevitt The Platonic elements of Aquinas’s metaphysical thought are now widely recognized. 1 These elements are perhaps on clearest display in Aquinas’s account of the existence and nature of God and creatures, which he explains in fundamentally Platonic terms of participation and divine ideas. 2 God is being itself subsisting, and creatures exist to the extent that they participate in being. God’s mind contains the ideas of each creature, and creatures are what they are insofar as they reflect God’s ideas of them. Even such cursory statements of Aquinas’s metaphysical views are recognizably Platonic. But of course everyone also recognizes that Aquinas roundly rejects Plato’s theory of separate forms or ideas. Throughout his career Aquinas consistently follows Aristotle in criticizing Plato and his followers for their commitment to the existence of separately subsisting forms. 3 There is no whiteness existing in itself apart from any particular 1 The seminal work on this topic was of course that of Fabro and Geiger. See Cornelio Fabro, La Nozione Metafisica di Partecipazione Secondo S. Tommaso d’Aquino, 2 nd ed. (Turin: Società editrice internazionale, 1950), Cornelio Fabro, Participation et Causalité Selon S. Thomas D’Aquin (Leuven: Publications Universitaíres de Louvain, 1961), and L.-B. Geiger, La Participation dans la Philosophie de S. Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1942). Other early work includes Arthur Little, The Platonic Heritage of Thomism (Dublin: Golden Eagle Books, 1950) and Robert J. Henle, Saint Thomas and Platonism (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956). Norris Clarke’s critical reviews of both books are worth mentioning here (along with his own work on the topic). See W. Norris Clarke, “Review of Arthur Little, The Platonic Heritage of Thomism,” Review of Metaphysics 8 (1954): 105–124 and “Review of Robert J. Henle, Saint Thomas and Platonism,” Thought 32 (1957): 437–443. For more recent work on the topic see, for example, Fran O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas (Leiden: Brill, 1992) and Rudi te Velde, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: Brill, 1995). For shorter introductions to the topic see Wayne J. Hankey, “Aquinas and the Platonists,” in The Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages: A Doxographic Approach, edited by Stephen Gersh and Maarten Hoenen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 279–324 and Fran O’Rourke, “Aquinas and Platonism,” in Contemplating Aquinas: On the Varieties of Interpretation, edited by Fergus Kerr (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), pp. 247–279. 2 In addition to the work already mentioned, see especially Wayne J. Hankey, God in Himself: Aquinas’s Doctrine of God as Expounded in the Summa Theologiae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) and Vivian Boland, Ideas in God According to Saint Thomas Aquinas: Sources and Synthesis (Leiden: Brill, 1996). 3 For all the texts in which Aquinas mentions Plato and his followers, see Part One of Henle, Saint Thomas and Platonism. For an analysis of the texts, especially their criticism of Plato and his followers, see Part Two. But note Clarke’s critical review of the book mentioned above.