This chapter starts from the extraordinary historical circumstance that Schleiermacher and Schlegel, a theologian and classical scholar and philosopher, who both had a huge influence on the development of their disciplines and the institution of the university, shared lodgings as students. It explores their relationship, and the importance of it for their subsequent careers, and expands from this toconsider how the seminary, as dominant theological educational institution, was overtaken in the university by the seminar – to explore how both educational forums show similar negotiations of the dynamic between personal, affective relationships and methodological rigour. It thus raises questions about how the public and the private, emotion and objectivity became values of scholarship between philology and theology in the university

The second chapter turns to the specific examples of Plato and of Socratic teaching as a template used for formulating an approach to the study of antiquity. It also introduces the institution of the philological seminar as a space for academic sociability modelled on Platonic precedent. Compared to an earlier interest in mainly Socrates (rather than Plato) as a mostly ambivalent figure, I trace a new understanding of Plato as the ostensibly unified author of systematic works centrally concerned with educational progress. My main example in this chapter is Wolf’s directorship of the philological seminar in Halle, together with his edition of Plato’s Symposium. I also look at the Socratic Memorabilia of J. G. Hamann (1759) and finally at some of the programmatic writings of Fichte and Schleiermacher for a new university in Berlin.