A Rejoinder to Matthew Ehret’s “Is LaRouche Lying About Plato’s Opposition to Aristotle?”
Dear Matt,
I had hoped that our next public exchange would occur in the spirit of the philia that Aristotle — alone among the major Greek philosophers — elevated to a distinct ethical treatise (Nicomachean Ethics VIII–IX). Regrettably, your 27 November Substack post, while prefaced with the language of friendship, proceeds in a tone of sustained condescension (“lack of patience, mixed with a bit too much hubris… jumping into shallow waters”), diagnostic psychologizing of my motives, and ad hominem implication that I have not read the primary sources you yourself have studied for “over 20 years.” This is all the more disappointing given that earlier you launched a similar broadside against our mutual friend The Duke Report™️ Peter Duke—critiquing a year old video —with Geopolitics & Empire on identical grounds of alleged intellectual sloppiness. One is left to wonder whether the Aristotelian virtue of friendship — which you implicitly scorn by dismissing its chief theoretician — might not have something to teach us about how truth-seeking colleagues ought to treat one another.
Let us, however, set personal tone aside and turn to the substance, where the most serious errors — both philosophical and historical — are to be found.
I. The Crux: Collapsing Metaphysics into Epistemology
