Schleiermacher’s Plato. By Julia A. Lamm

Abstract

Friedrich Schleiermacher is known today primarily as a theologian and a philosopher of religion. He was also, however, a consummate student of Plato’s philosophy. His translation of (almost) the entire corpus of Plato’s dialogues into German was the first ever attempt of this kind and has been the most influential one to date. Moreover, he inaugurated within Plato studies principles of interpretation that have since been widely accepted as normative. Notably, Schleiermacher insisted that Plato’s authentic philosophy had to be reconstructed from his dialogues and not, as taken for granted by many earlier scholars, from a putative, esoteric doctrine transmitted orally only to his students. Henceforth, the study of Plato’s philosophy became largely coextensive with the interpretation of his dialogues as historical texts. Thus, while many of Schleiermacher’s specific interpretative decisions were inevitably discarded in the process, the programme of research he enunciated remained foundational for subsequent Plato studies. Even now few accounts of the history of Platonic scholarship fail to refer to Schleiermacher’s work as a watershed moment in the emergence of the discipline.