The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy)

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) is widely recognized as the leading exponent of philosophical hermeneutics. The essays in this volume examine Gadamer's biography, the core of hermeneutical theory, and the significance of his work for ethics, aesthetics, the social sciences, and theology. There is full consideration of Gadamer's appropriation of Hegel, Heidegger and the Greeks, as well as his relation to modernity, critical theory and poststructuralism. This revised edition includes several new chapters on aspects of 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" was too 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)"-- Provided by publisher Series Copyright Contents Contributors Abbreviations Introduction - Robert J. Dostal 1 Gadamer (1900–2002): The Man and His Work - Robert J. Dostal 2 Gadamer’s Basic Understanding of Understanding - Jean Grondin 3 Getting It Right: Relativism, Realism, and Truth - Brice Wachterhauser 4 Philosophical Hermeneutics, Language, and the Communicative Event - James Risser 5 Phronesis and Solidarity: Democratic Politics - Darren Walhof 6 Gadamer’s Herderian Critics - Georgia Warnke 7 Gadamer on the Human Sciences - Charles Taylor 8 Art Experience and Its Transformative Potential in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics - Beata Sirowy 9 Lyric as Paradigm: Hegel and the Speculative Instance of Poetry in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics - J. M. Baker Jr. 10 Gadamer, the Hermeneutic Revolution, and Theology - Fred Lawrence 11 Hermeneutics in Practice: Gadamer on Ancient Philosophy - Catherine H. Zuckert 12 Gadamer’s Hegel - Robert B. Pippin 13 Gadamer’s Relation to Heidegger and to Phenomenology - Robert J. Dostal 14 The Constellation of Hermeneutics, Critical Theory, and Deconstruction - Richard J. Bernstein 15 Hermeneutics in a Broader Horizon: Gadamer, Rorty, Davidson - Niall Keane Bibliography Index Series (continued from page ii)