Ideenlehre
In Lecture II, Cherniss defended the consistency of the dialogues by arguing that Plato's supposed late development of a mathematical ontology is a misinterpretation imposed by Aristotle on material found in the dialogues: "… the theory of idea-numbers which Aristotle ascribes to Plato is just Aristotle's own interpretation of the necessary consequences [he finds] implied in the doctrine of the Platonic dialogues …" Thus there is no reason, for example, to see a critique of an "early" Theory of Forms in the dialogues that was remedied by a later mathematical theory.