The chief feature of Gadamer's philosophy is his claim that the humanities obey their own rules concerning reading texts and ensuring certitude. The promise of certitude is illusory, however, and the discourses on interpretation by him and his leading disciples are too confused to instruct the reader. His own sketch of his philosophy, published in his autobiographic Philosophical Apprenticeship, and its reflection in Gadamer and Hermeneutics (Hugh J. Silverman, ed.), shows this and reveals him as still too insensitive to the (...) national tragedy of the Third Reich, which he witnessed. (shrink)

Gadamer's rethinking of the interconnection of theory and practice can lead to a resolution of the debate in contemporary Aristotelian scholarship regarding the priority of theory or practice in Aristotle's Ethics. This is especially true in light of Aristotle's treatment of friendship which, as I will try to show, provides support for Gadamer's claim. In Aristotle's notion of friendship, theory and practice come together, and the activity of friendship is for Aristotle the highest expression of human life precisely because true (...) friendship requires the unity of theory and practice. I argue that Aristotle's sense of , contemplation, his sense of ultimate happiness that is constituted by the life of theory, is conceived by Aristotle in a thoroughly practical and political sense. Specifically I claim that the practice of theory is the politics of friendship. (shrink)

Fifteen essays examine the work of German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer to provide feminist interpretations of his views on science, language, history, ...

The present paper aims to bring to light the relevance of Wittgenstein‘s thought for philosophical hermeneutics. In this sense it offers a thorough discussion of the Austrian philosopher‘s understanding of the concept of translation through a detailed examination of its development from its first formulation in the context of the picture theory of meaning in the Tractatus to its reformulation as "language game" and "form of life" within the use theory put forth in Philosophical Investigations. The paper argues that the (...) skepticism towards the history of everyday language implied by Wittgenstein‘s understanding of translation could be taken as an important step forward in the development of a critical dimension of philosophical hermeneutics. (shrink)

The present paper deals with the philosophical styles of the hermeneutic project and deconstruction and tries to answer the question whether there really is, as Derrida argues, a fundamental difference, even an opposition between them. In this sense, taking the questions Derrida addressed Gadamer in their famous Paris encounter in 1981 as a clue, the author retraces the fundamental articulations of deconstruction, descending from Derrida's own description of the idea to his actual deconstructive practice, and shows that the presupposition Derrida (...) takes as separating the hermeneutic project from deconstruction is actually one these two share in common. (shrink)

What is the difference between hermeneutics and deconstruction? This essay provides an answer by following the guiding thread of understanding that was already brought to the fore in Paris during the "improbable debate" between Gadamer and Derrida. Maybe there was and still is a "dialogue" between the two most important currents of continental philosophy, as Derrida suggests in his talk commemorating Gadamer at Heidelberg in 2002. It is a dialogue that passes through poetry, and above all the poems of Celan. (...) In this way, the distance or the proximity between hermeneutics and deconstruction rests in the meaning of understanding: the one beginning from the uninterrupted dialogue, the other from the difference of interruption. Through a phenomenology of saying and of understanding, this essay asks at the same time how the differences of deconstruction are the stars necessary for the constellation of hermeneutics, and how the constellation is nevertheless necessary for every new star. It is perhaps the Schibboleth of Celan that indicates the point of orientation. (shrink)

Hans-Georg Gadamer (b. 1900) is widely recognized as the leading exponent of philosophical hermeneutics. The essays in this collection examine Gadamer's biography, the core of hermeneutical theory, and the significance of his work for ethics, aesthetics, the social sciences, and theology. There is full consideration of Gadamer's appropriation of Hegel, Heidegger and the Greeks, as well as his relation to modernity, critical theory and poststructuralism.

In Gadamer's hermeneutics the relationship of philology to philosophy and to the Geisteswissenschaften often became a focus of his hermeneutical reflection. In the first part of my contribution, I investigate and reconstruct this relationship in Gadamer's thinking. In the second part, I take up a recent debate about Gadamer in Hungary, and in connection with it offer a case study in which Gadamerian thinking is present in a twofold way: as that with which I am reflecting and at the same (...) time what it is about – the object of this reflection. The first part comes to the conclusion that the interconnectedness of philology and philosophy, with each side referring to the other, is central to Gadamer's work; it is moreover the element in which Gadamer's writings move. It is the focus on the text as text versus a focus on the text as the mediator of a matter [Sache] that makes the difference between philology and philosophy. This difference may give rise to a kind of tension, and this is addressed in the second part of the paper, by way of showing a passage from Gadamer's work susceptible to philological objections. (shrink)

In this paper I take up the "claim to universality" of hermeneutics, as put forth by Hans-Georg Gadamer; the aim is to grasp the "life that can understand," to grasp it in its essence and in terms of understanding. In this way I deal critically with Gadamer's (and Heidegger's) idea that all understanding is "self-understanding" and work out the dependence of understanding on the other, on the "hermeneutic object" (Gegenstand) of understanding. But a "hermeneutic object" (Gegenstand) is not a "mere (...) object" (Objekt). On the basis of this distinction, I develop, in conclusion, a critical reflection on the selfobjectification of the human in those interpretations of human life that are oriented solely to natural science. Self-objectfication is a wrongly directed understanding and can therefore be corrected on the basis of a developed concept of life as understanding. (shrink)

In a letter written to Gadamer after receiving a copy of Truth and Method, Leo Strauss offered many criticisms with which Gadamer took issue. However, he acknowledged the important hint cited in the title. Perhaps strangely, Gadamer never took up this hint and showed very little interest in comedy throughout his Gesammelte Schriften. In this essay, I show that there are ample resources within Gadamerian hermeneutics to answer Strauss positively, also for a rich philosophy of comedy along Gadamerian lines. Toward (...) that end, I use Gadamer’s Aristotelian view of tragedy as a clue; interpretations of play, excess and delight (Ergötzen) also weave into the analyses. (shrink)

Often, respectable scholars attack the soundness of Heidegger's "violent" interpretations of Hölderlin (and others). In this case, Dieter Henrich offers a particularly harsh assessment of Heidegger's interpretation of " Andenken." Hans-Georg Gadamer, student of Heidegger and teacher of Henrich, attempts to bring harmony where none seems possible. A study of the three interpretations indicates that scholarship alone is sufficient to reach a decision on the strength of the interpretations.

Written in the 1960s, TRUTH AND METHOD is Gadamer's magnum opus.

This volume makes available for the first time in English the most important of Hans-Georg Gadamer's extensive writings on art and literature. The principal text included is 'The Relevance of the Beautiful', Gadamer's most sustained treatment of philosophical aesthetics. The eleven other essays focus particularly on the challenge issued by modern painting and literature to our customary ideas of art, and use that challenge to revitalize our understanding of it. Gadamer demonstrates the continuing importance of such concepts as imitation, truth, (...) symbol, and play for our appreciation of contemporary art, and thereby establishes its continuity with the Western tradition. The essays here are not technical and are readily accessible to the beginning student and the general reader. The collection as a whole serves to illustrate the practice of hermeneutics and to introduce Gadamer's thought. Robert Bernasconi provides an introduction clarifying the central aims of the essays and their relations to Gadamer's major work, Truth and Method, and to the philosophy of art since Kant. A bibliography of Gadamer's writings available in English is also included. (shrink)

This excellent collection contains 13 essays from Gadamer'sKleine Schriften,dealing with hermeneutical reflection, phenomenology, existential philosophy, and ...

... ou im- plicitement lie ä un ensemble de categories mentales et d'autres enonces (la simple affirmation: Napoleon est mort ä Sainte-Helene implique dans ...

This essay seeks to examine the relation between selfhood and history through Gadamer's conception of hermeneutical experience, one of the cornerstones of his theory of effective history in Truth and Method. By setting Gadamer's project into relation with those of Heidegger and Hegel, my primary focus is to demonstrate how effective history, in its emphasis upon the finite, the partial, and the fragmented, actually turns these seeming deficiencies into advantages for human self-understanding in the current theoretical climate of plurality and (...) diversity. I argue that the dialectical model of the relationship between self and tradition given by Gadamer serves to reveal our human limitations, and thereby allows us a space in which self-determination can be carried out through an effective-historical consciousness that avoids the pitfalls of subject-centered, all-encompassing, unified theories of history, on the one hand, and scientifically unselfconscious, ahistorical approaches to selfhood, on the other. The essay closes with an application of effective-historical consciousness to the tradition of post-holocaust German theater, where hermeneutical experience functions to provide resources for Jewish self-determination through the same tradition that had formerly excluded them. (shrink)

The essay takes as its point of departure the way in which the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer has recently been adopted by philosophers such as Richard Rorty, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom. While appreciating the way in which Truth and Method has gained new relevance within an Anglo-American context, I ask whether sufficient attention has been paid to Gadamer’s romantic heritage. In particular I question the way in which his notion of tradition and historical truth, designed as it is to (...) overcome the ramifications of Descartes and the Kantian enlightenment, is modeled on the example of art and aesthetic experience. (shrink)

The relationship between 20th-century phenomenology and the transcendental program launched by Immanuel Kant is crucial, but delicate. First there is Husserl, who seemed both attracted to and seriously critical of Kant's first Critique. Then there is Heidegger's ambition to scour the entire field of the three Critiques. Most important in this context, is probably his reading of the Critique of Pure Reason in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929). Faithful to his notion of a salvaging “destruction” of the philosophical (...) tradition, Heidegger argues that the earliest version of Kant's work, the so-called A-deduction, is radically different from the philosophy promoted by the neo-Kantians. Kant, he claims, was not really interested in epistemology in the narrow meaning of the term. He was, rather, a philosopher verging upon a genuine ontology of Being, but who, for reasons that remain unknown, felt forced to leave these tracks behind in order to pursue the transcendental conditions of knowledge. Then there is the second Critique, which Heidegger approaches through a discussion of the Kantian notions of freedom and causality. And, finally, there are his remarks about the Critique of Judgment, scattered all over his writing on art from the early 1930s onwards. However, Heidegger never produces a proper, systematic account of the relevance of the third Critique. Such an account, I argue in this essay, is provided by Hans-Georg Gadamer. (shrink)

The present paper uses the theme of dialectic and dialogue to begin unraveling the similarities and differences between the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and H.G. Gadamer. Ricoeur is shown to distance himself from Heidegger by insisting on a dimension of explanation and distanciation (which he sometimes identifies with Plato's `descending dialectic') that cannot be reduced to, or absorbed by, understanding and appropriation. This same move, however, leads him to reject Platonic dialogue, with the attendant prioritizing of oral conversation over the (...) written text, as a model for hermeneutics. Ricoeur therefore sees in Gadamer's recourse to such a model a regression to the problematic position of Heidegger. Yet the conception of philosophy as dialectical and dialogical which Gadamer finds in Plato is capable of responding to Ricoeur's objections. Where the fundamental difference between the hermeneutics of Ricoeur and Gadamer emerges is in the question of whether experience is fundamentally dialectical and whether language is inherently dialogical. (shrink)

In this work I search for elements that contribute to the development of the ethical dimension of environmental education. I start with the existence of what C.A. Bowers calls “areas of silence” in the curriculum in both schools and universities. The reason for this silence, I argue, is to be found in the Cartesian conceptual structures of curricula. I suggest that the works of Bacon, Galileo and Descartes provoke a twofold process that I have termed the forgetting of tradition and (...) objectification of nature. As a corrective to this process, I explore the possibilities that the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer opens for rehabilitation of tradition and de-objectification of nature. I work with the concept of the “dignity of things” present in Greek dialectics: that nature is not simply a projection of mind (as the neo-Kantians claim), but something that thought suffers. In my conclusions I argue that for nature to be reinserted into almost all areas of knowledge it is necessary that we respect “the otherness of nature.”. (shrink)

Gadamer and Habermas both argue that some earlier theorists of interpretation in the human sciences, despite recognizing the meaningful character of social reality, still succumb to objectivism because they fail to conceive the relation of interpreters to their subjects in terms of cross-cultural normative "dialogue." In particular, Gadamer and Habermas claim that the most prominent nineteenth-century philosopher of the human sciences, Wilhelm Dilthey, fell prey to a misleading Cartesian outlook which sought to ground the objectivity of interpretation on complete transcendence (...) of the interpreter's present cultural and historical situation. This article challenges Gadamer's and Habermas's claim by arguing that new research on nineteenth-century hermeneutic thought reveals Dilthey to be much more aware of the reflexive, present-centered nature of historical research than they maintain and further that their own "dialogical" model of interpretation suffers from notable obscurities which Dilthey's work itself helps expose. Key Words: Dilthey • Gadamer • Habermas • hermeneutics. (shrink)

Axel Honneth investigates an ambiguity in Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. In Truth and Method, Gadamer lays out key forms of reciprocal recognition. By means of them, he can subject historical transmission to normative appraisal. Gadamer makes the recognitional interaction relative only to an 'I' and 'Thou', omitting reference to an objective 'Third'. Honneth claims that Gadamer posits this restriction based on the influence of Heidegger's Mitwelt concept. Honneth claims, however, that Gadamer's model fails to explain the possibility of a hermeneutic openness (...) to agents who are not in close personal proximity to us. Instead, Honneth argues that the concrete other in I/Thou relations must be supplemented by a standpoint where the concrete and generalized other continually and reciprocally correct one another. Key Words: concrete other • Gadamer • generalized other • Heidegger • hermeneutics • intersubjectivity • recognition. (shrink)

Introduction -- Christian and Greek -- Situating Gadamer philosophically -- Wholes -- Temporality and art -- Art, religious experience, philosophy -- Intellectualism.

Certain critics, e.g. Manfred Frank and Hans-Herbert Kögler, claim that Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics reduces the individual subject to a mere instrument of history and tradition, the latter reproducing themselves through the subject. However, Gadamer also emphasizes the active role of the subject in shaping and creating history and tradition. In this article I argue that the critics mistakenly emphasize a one-sided conception of history. By incorporating both active and passive aspects of the subject, Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics provides the means (...) by which the individual may be conceived more aptly in an interdependent, dialectical relation to their corresponding historical, cultural, and social context. (shrink)

Gadamer was fond of telling of his last meeting with his old teacher Martin Heidegger: ‘You are right’, said Heidegger, ‘language is conversation [Sprache ist Gespräch].’1 We might argue as to what such a comment, assuming Gadamer remembered it aright, would really have meant for Heidegger – whether it would have constituted a significant revision of any view to which Heidegger was himself committed.2 The fact that Gadamer felt it worth repeating, however, does indicate something of Gadamer’s conception of the (...) relation between his thought and that of Heidegger, as well as of the centrality of the idea at issue in his own thought. Indeed, elsewhere Gadamer has commented that. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer both a brief study of Collingwood's conception of historical explanation and epistemological historicity, and an examination of the influence of Collingwood's work on the historical methodology of Quentin Skinner and on Gadamer's hermeneutic philosophy. Collingwood's work on the philosophy of history manifests a tension between the realist implications of the doctrine of reenactment and the logic of question and answer on the one hand, and, on the other, the constructionist tendency of the rest of his (...) work on the logic of historical inquiry and on the hermeneutic character of his more general conception of human historicity. This tension is displayed in the divergent interpretations of Collingwood by Quentin Skinner and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and in the inherent difficulties of each man's philosophy of history. I argue that the weaknesses of Skinner's methodological historicism are present already in his reading of Collingwood and reflect the difficulties inherent in understanding Collingwood as offering primarily a methodology of history. I also claim that Gadamer's hermeneutic philosophy, while presenting a more plausible reading of Collingwood, suffers from tensions similar to those within Collingwood's work between the logic of explanation and the logic of practical recommendation, and between the character of historical explanation and the character of philosophical understanding. (shrink)