Philosophical Apprenticeships

Abstract

Abstract A student of Natorp and Heidegger at Marburg, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–) has been professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg since 1949. His first book, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics (1931), announced one of the major themes of his later work: the role of dialogue in the tasks of hermeneutic interpretation. Critical of Heidegger’s rejection of the history of philosophy of as merely logocentric, he thought that “the return to being” is best expressed in the continuity of a tradition of dialogic interpretation. In Truth and Method (1960) and Philosophical Hermeneutics (1967–1972) Gadamer argue that art should replace natural science as the model for understanding in the human sciences because works of art are inexhaustibly open to interpretation. Like genuine conversation, the “dialogue” between an interpreter and a work of art transforms the interpreter’s self-understanding. Habermas has criticized Gadamer for a conservatism that seems implicit in treating dialogue as a hermeneutic interpretation of the past, rather than as political deliberation about the future. Gadamer replied that he was engaged in explicating the conditions for the possibility of any communication—conservative or revolutionary. In Dialogue and Deconstruction (1989) Gadamer attacked (what he saw as) Derrida’s claim that perceptive interpretation under-mines itself by revealing its own critical deconstruction.