This book investigates the formative years of Hans-Georg Gadamer's Plato studies, while studying with Martin Heidegger at Marburg University. It outlines the evolution of Heidegger's understanding of Plato, explains why his hermeneutical phenomenology inspired Gadamer, and, why his argument that Plato was responsible for Western civilization's forgetting the meaning of existence was a provocation. Heidegger's argument that Plato is an ontological dualist was crucial to the development of Gadamer's understanding of Plato. The book thus puts forward an argument for Gadamer's having indirectly refuted Heidegger's Plato. This involves re-examination of the relationship between Plato and Aristotle in matters of ethics, physics and truth. Above all, however, it is Gadamer's concept of Platonic dialectic that questions Heidegger's belief that Plato is a metaphysician. This challenge to Heidegger's Plato was commensurate with the origination of Gadamer's positive hermeneuti