Abstract

Gadamer's correlation between hermeneutics and practical philosophy can be seen as the accomplishment of a movement, started by Husserl and deepened by Heidegger, aiming at reaching the pre-objective moment of experience as the foundational level of philosophical reflection. The return to the pre-objective moment of experience expresses a basic argument shared by Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer; precisely: contrarily to scientific reason that, by its very nature, must emancipate itself from the sphere of experience, philosophical reason has as its own task the clarification of the necessary connection between knowledge and experience. ;But if Heidegger sees in the primacy of the understanding of Being the possibility of reaching the level of human comportment in its concretion beyond the formalism of Husserl's intentional acts of consciousness Gadamer, on his turn, although in agreement with the heideggerian perception of understanding as the most original human experience, makes the relation-with-the-other, and not Being, the center of his analysis. Consequently, when Gadamer affirms the primacy of understanding the issue is no longer Being, but mutual understanding. In this way, we can perceive Gadamer's correlation between hermeneutics and practical philosophy as an attempt to re-state, against Heidegger, the intimate connection that exists between the dimension of praxis and a philosophical reflection that constitutes itself as an ontology of understanding