The Review of Metaphysics

Reading this book is like getting a lively tour of the Portland Building (1120 Southwest 5th Ave., Portland, Oregon) from a seasoned critic. The landmark municipal building, although not well known by the American public, has received quite a bit of attention within the architectural world. Some have welcomed its departure from modernist minimalism, praising its bold and colorful appropriation of classical decorative elements. Others have dismissed it as already outdated.

Like the Portland Building, the historical significance of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) remains undecided. His thought has been lauded, including by the present reviewer, as offering a novel and profound theory of interpretation, one that draws upon the great works of classical antiquity. Other philosophers have been less impressed, finding Gadamer's writings "flat and unprofitable," as Jonathan Barnes once put it.

In this book Robert Dostal weighs in. He promises the reader a "comprehensive" but "critical" tour of Gadamer's philosophy. This is no small task, since the collected writings of Gadamer span ten volumes written across almost as many decades. But Dostal is a trusted guide, having established himself as a leading scholar on Gadamer and the phenomenological tradition. And like any good guide, Dostal reliably shows us all that deserves our attention, even while taking his own distinctive route, replete with its particular emphases and amusing asides. [End Page 814]

The introduction lays out the main controversies. There is the "phenomenological challenge," which objects to Gadamer's central thesis that all understanding is interpretative; we can, so the challenge goes, have an understanding of the world prior to interpreting it. There is also the "philological challenge," which contends that any decent theory of hermeneutics should specify a criterion by which to judge interpretations as good or bad, and this Gadamer fails to provide. Dostal gives a qualified defense against both charges. The following potted summary of the book is intended to sketch his defense, but it omits many insights that Dostal shares with us along the way.

The first three chapters situate Gadamer's thought in its essential relations to the Enlightenment period, the humanist tradition, and ancient philosophy. Chapter 1 parses Gadamer's "ambivalence" toward the Enlightenment. He finds problematic its commitment to representationalism and its denigration of phronēsis ("prudence"). On the other hand, Gadamer appreciates the Enlightenment for its cultivation of liberal democracy and modern science. Chapter 2 shows how Gadamer finds in the humanist tradition a call to the classical as a remedy for the shortcomings of the Enlightenment. Chapter 3 traces the principal sources of these remedies back to Plato and Aristotle, who demonstrate how we might resist the subjectivism underlying both representationalism and the reduction of prudence to means–end instrumental reasoning.

In the following three chapters, Dostal explains how Gadamer's return to the ancient Greeks furnishes conceptual resources with which to develop an account of human understanding that does not succumb to pitfalls that have beset much of modern European philosophy. Chapter 4 describes how Gadamer takes up the notions of eikōn and mimēsis in his own account of the artwork. Chapter 5 explains Gadamer's conception of language and the sense in which language mediates all understanding. This explanation requires attending to Gadamer's slogan that "Being that can be understood is language." On Dostal's reading, Gadamer does not mean by this that all understanding is in language but, rather, that all understanding is capable of being made intelligible in language. Gadamer, after all, acknowledges that we often grasp things in perception without the use of words. However, we can always "awaken" such perceptions and articulate them in language by means of what Gadamer calls the "inner word." This is the core of Dostal's response to the phenomenological challenge. In chapter 6, Dostal shows how Gadamer appreciates modern science (Wissenschaft) while also recognizing its deficiencies. Gadamer rejects any notion of objectivity that implies some value-free, impartial inquirer, but he nevertheless affirms...