Gadamer Hans-Georg (b.1900), German philosopher, the leading proponent of hermeneutics in the second half of the twentieth century. He studied at Marburg in the 1920s with Natorp and Heidegger. His first book, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics (1931), bears their imprint and reflects his abiding interest in Greek philosophy. Truth and Method (1960) established Gadamer as an original thinker and had an impact on a variety of disciplines outside philosophy, including theology, legal theory, and literary criticism.
The three parts of Truth and Method combine to displace the scientific conceptions of truth and method as the model for understanding in the human sciences. In the first part, which presents itself as a critique of the abstraction inherent in aesthetic consciousness, Gadamer argues that artworks make a claim to truth. Later Gadamer draws on the play of art in the experience of the beautiful to offer an analogy to how a text draws its readers into the event of truth by making a claim on them. In the central portion of the book Gadamer presents tradition as a condition of understanding. Tradition is not for him an object of historical knowledge, but part of one’s very being. The final section of Truth and Method is concerned with language as the site of tradition. Gadamer sought to shift the focus of hermeneutics from the problems of obscurity and misunderstanding to the community of understanding that the participants in a dialogue share through language.
Gadamer was involved in three debates that define his philosophical contribution. The first was an ongoing debate with Heidegger reflected throughout Gadamer’s corpus. Gadamer did not accept all of the innovations that Heidegger introduced into his thinking in the 1930s, particularly his reconstruction of the history of philosophy as the history of being. Gadamer also rejected Heidegger’s elevation of Hölderlin to the status of an authority. Gadamer’s greater accessibility led Habermas to characterize Gadamer’s contribution as that of having ‘urbanized the Heideggerian province.’ The second debate was with Habermas himself. Habermas criticized Gadamer’s rejection of the Enlightenment’s ‘prejudice against prejudice.’ Whereas Habermas objected to the conservatism inherent in Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudice, Gadamer explained that he was only setting out the conditions for understanding, conditions that did not exclude the possibility of radical change. The third debate, which formed the basis of Dialogue and Deconstruction (1989), was with Derrida. Derridean deconstruction is indebted to Heidegger’s later philosophy and so this debate was in part about the direction philosophy should take after Heidegger. However, many observers concluded that there was no real engagement between Gadamer and Derrida. To some it seemed that Derrida, by refusing to accept the terms on which Gadamer insisted dialogue should take place, had exposed the limits imposed by hermeneutics. To others it was confirmation that any attempt to circumvent the conditions of dialogue specified by Gadamerian hermeneutics is selfdefeating. See also DERRIDA, HEIDEGGER , HERMENEU – TIC. R.L.B.