Gadamer - Truth And Method

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Hans-Georg Gadamer

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1900 – 2002 German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode). Heidegger's influenced Gadamer's thought.

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Truth and Method

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Truth and Method was published twice in English, and the revised edition is now considered authoritative. The German-language edition of Gadamer's Collected Works includes a volume in which Gadamer elaborates his argument and discusses the critical response to the book. Finally, Gadamer's essay on Celan (entitled "Who Am I and Who Are You?") has been considered by many—including Heidegger and Gadamer himself—as a "second volume" or continuation of the argument in Truth and Method.

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Truth and Method - Argument

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Elaborates on Heidegger's concept of "philosophical hermeneutics." Gadamer's goal was to uncover the nature of human understanding. Gadamer argues that people have a 'historically effected consciousness' and that they are embedded in the particular history and culture that shaped them.Elaborates on Heidegger's concept of "philosophical hermeneutics."

Gadamer's goal was to uncover the nature of human understanding. Gadamer argues that people have a 'historically effected consciousness' and that they are embedded in the particular history and culture that shaped them. Further understanding is 3 way affair, between the subject and the communitacor or another receiver of the subject, and the self. Thus understanding Verstehen is related to Verständigung (agreement) and Sichverstehen (self understanding), and language is the medium or Vermittlung

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Interpretation

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Interpreting a text involves a 'fusion of horizons' where the scholar finds the ways that the text's history articulates with their own background. For him, 'hermeneutics' is not used as methodology, but "as a theory of the real experience that thinking is" (Int. 33)

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Argues Against:

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Critical of purley dialectical approaches, here is sides with Kant that this can produce no actual knowledge.

Critical of modern approaches modeled on the natural sciences (and thus on rigorous scientific methods).

Critical of traditional German approach represented by Schleiermacher and Dilthey (6), which believed that correctly interpreting a text meant recovering the original intention of the author. "seduced by its hermeneutic starting point into reading history as a book" (int. 31)

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History and Tradition

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One of the German words for experience "Erfahrung" means for Gadamer - We are to relate to our cultural past through a dialogue of question and answer which produces a non-dogmatic wisdom by our growing sense of broad persopectives of human life and culture. (Pref 13)