Wenzel Braunfels, M.A.

PhD Project

On the intention and impact of Schleiermacher’s Plato

This dissertation deals with Schleiermacher’s intention and impact of his venture of translating Plato. The dissertation explicitly is not a philological critique of Schleiermacher’s translation; instead it analyzes the hermeneutical-critical introductions Schleiermacher wrote for each Platonic dialogue. Four related themes are focused on:

1. His work on Plato immediately precedes Schleiermacher’s lectures on hermeneutics and had a decided impact on those. It thus must be analyzed inasmuch Schleiermacher was influenced by Plato in developing his hermeneutical methodology, which he eventually taught as applicable to homiletic exegesis of the New Testament.

2. In his general introduction to the Platonic dialogues, Schleiermacher spends the most substantial part on the rejection of all attempts to distinguish between the exoteric and esoteric in Plato. His denial on this distinction had and has a profound impact on academic philosophy, even after its publicly displayed rediscovery by Leo Strauss in the middle of the 20th century.

3. Schleiermacher, like noone before him, radically questioned the authenticity of Plato’s authorship of the dialogues. He thus established a continued debate in Plato studies, which, however, is executed not on the plane of thought or philosophy, but on the plane of language or philology.

4. Considering the above as well Schleiermacher’s self-understanding as a Protestant theologian and thus a believer in revelation, his postulated proposition, informed by historicist hermeneutics, to better understand an author than he understood himself, leads to the question if Schleiermacher was unable or unwilling to understand Plato philosophically and if traces of this can be found in his translation and introductions.

(The dissertation is written in German)