The Knapp Foundation is delighted to announce that the Heidegger and Classical Thought research project, led by Laurence Hemming and Aaron Turner (and now entering its seventh year), will for the next two years undertake a new reading of the 1924/25 Marburg lecture course published Platon: Sophistes (Plato’s Sophist), published as vol. 19 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe in 1992. The text was translated into English by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer and published by Indiana University Press in 1997.
This was Heidegger’s first full-scale confrontation with Plato, examining the dialogue almost line by line. Uniquely in Heidegger’s oeuvre it in interprets Plato from Heidegger’s already intensive confrontation with Aristotle – indeed one third of the lectures are taken up with readings of (among other texts) the Nicomachean Ethics, while making frequent appeal to the Physics and Metaphysics of Aristotle. Marburg, where the lectures were delivered, had been the place from which Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp had each developed their understanding of Plato’s Ideenlehre or doctrine of ideas (Cohen began this work in 1878). The Philologist Paul Friedländer, who brought his own reading of Plato to its first maturity in Marburg, was a colleague of Heidegger’s there.
The lectures contain a further development of Heidegger’s reading of Parmenides, influential (as are the lectures as a whole) for the writing of Being and Time. The lectures, and transcripts of them, remained important for a multitude of scholars, not least Jakob Klein and Hans-Georg Gadamer.
We will begin weekly online seminars from Wednesday 14th October 2026 beginning from 16:00 to 17:30 UK time (GMT or BST), with breaks over the normal holiday periods. Occasionally we will provide extended considerations of issues in the text. We will work in English from both the German text and its English translation, also making direct reference to the Greek text of Plato’s Sophist dialogue. The English translation is a fine and rigorous rendering of the German original, which brings the added difficulty that a significant amount of the Greek quoted is not translated. It will not be necessary for participants to be fluent on German or Greek, and efforts will be made to work with the untranslated Greek in a way that makes Heidegger’s interpretation of it as accessible as possible. Given the particular difficulties associated even with the translation, a web-page providing additional supporting materials, language tools and bibliographic suggestions will be made available. In a break from previous practice, the introductions to the seminars will focus more on textual and translation issues, leaving the thematic aspects to open discussion.