The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) is widely recognized as the leading exponent of philosophical hermeneutics. This revised edition includes several new chapters on Gadamer's work, as well as updated chapters from the first edition and the most comprehensive bibliography of works by and about Gadamer available in the English language.

"In 1960 Hans-Georg Gadamer, then a sixty-year-old German philosophy professor at Heidelberg, published Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode). Although he had authored many essays, articles, and reviews, to this point Gadamer had published only one other book, his habilitation on Plato in 1931: Plato''s Dialectical Ethics. As a title for this work on a theory of interpretation, he first proposed to his publisher, Mohr Siebeck, "Philosophical Hermeneutics." The publisher responded that "hermeneutics" wastoo obscure a term. Gadamer then proposed "Truth and Method" for a work that found, over time, great resonance and made "hermeneutics" and Gadamer''s name commonplace in intellectual circles worldwide. Truth and Method has been translated into many languages, including Chinese and Japanese. It found and still finds a receptive readership, in part, because, as the title suggests, it addresses large and central philosophical issues in an attempt to find a way between or beyond objectivism and relativism, and scientism and irrationalism. He accomplishes this by developing an account of what he takes to be the universal hermeneutic experience of understanding. Understanding, for Gadamer, is itself always a matter of interpretation. Understanding is also always a matter of language. "Being that can be understood is language," writes Gadamer in the culminating section of the work in which he proposes a "hermeneutical ontology" (TM 432)"--