ABSTRACT
A strong case can be made for the claim that Hegel was the first modern thinker to read the Platonic dialogues seriously and philosophically. Several considerations, partly historical and partly philosophical, are relevant to this. Schleiermacher's German translation of the Platonic dialogues not only made this crucial body of work available to contemporaneous philosophers like Hegel, but has remained in print as the standard version of Plato's works in German to the present day. Schleiermacher's German translation of the Platonic dialogues not only made this crucial body of work available to contemporaneous philosophers like Hegel, but has remained in print as the standard version of Plato's works in German to the present day. At the conclusion of his reading of Plato's dialogues Hegel offers a brief summary of his engagement with them, in the form of what we might today call "talking points".
