In these essays, appearing for the first time in English, Gadamer addresses practical questions about recent politics in Europe, about education and university reform, and about the role of poetry in the modern world. This book also includes a series of interviews that the editors conducted in 1986. Gadamer elaborates on his experiences in education and politics, touching on the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the early Frankfurt School, Heidegger and the Nazis, university life in East Germany, and the prospects (...) for Europe in the coming years. Hans-Georg Gadamer was probably Heidegger’s leading interpreter in Germany, and in the 1950s and 1960s he became the world’s leading exponent of hermeneutics. His hermeneutical theory explains how it is that ancient art and philosophy still speak to us today. His influential idea of the “fusion of horizons” also shows how it is that we understand what is remote form our own culture. (shrink)

Presenting the major schools, movements and traditions in philosophy and the history of ideas since the beginning of the Enlightenment, this work introduces modern hermeneutics through an examination of the ideas of its key philosophical proponents.

This text adresses the timely topic of relativism from the perspective of Gadamer's hermeneutics. This collection of essays explores several of the key issues in contemporary philosophy - the nature of truth, the model of conversation, and the possibility of an ethics in postmodern conditions - in the context of the work of Gadamer. Although centred on Gadamer and including the first English translation of one of his essays, the volume does not narrowly define or defend the approach of philosophical (...) hermeneutics; the contributors present a broad range of views, in some cases championing a Gadamerian perspective, in others challenging it. (shrink)

There are broad and narrow senses of hermeneutic application as well as of hermeneutic praxis. The broad sense of hermeneutic application means using what one has already understood in some later situation. Hermeneutic praxis in the narrow sense refers to an interpreter using a hermeneutic theory to interpret written or spoken language. The narrow sense of hermeneutic application is discussed by Hans‐Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method as the central problem of philosophical hermeneutics. Friedrich Schleiermacher had noted that the lax (...) practice of hermeneutics, which had been previously the main form of hermeneutics, assumes that understanding usually succeeds and that interpretation is only called for in difficult cases where misinterpretation might occur. Usually, after one has understood, interpreted, and applied an order to the concrete situation, one would carry out that order as it was understood. This action that follows from understanding is hermeneutic praxis in the broad sense. (shrink)

In this book, internationally recognized scholars in philosophical hermeneutics discuss various aspects of language and linguisticality. The translations of Hans-Georg Gadamer's two recent essays provoke a preliminary discussion on the philosopher's polemic claim in Truth and Method—"Being that can be understood is language." Topics addressed by the contributors include the relationship of rituals to tradition and the immemorial; the unity of the word; conversation; translation and conceptuality; and the interrelationship between the art of writing and linguisticality. This work is of (...) critical importance to anyone interested in Gadamer's claims regarding the boundaries of language, the transition from the prelinguistic to linguistic realms, and the role of rituals in this transition. (shrink)