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Understanding Gadamer*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Robert Wicks
Affiliation:
The University of Auckland

Extract

The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn, the twenty-fourth volume in the “Library of Living Philosophers”—a series founded in 1938 by Paul Arthur Schlipp, the aim of which has been to represent some of the world's greatest living philosphers. In keeping with this tradition, the 600-page Gadamer volume contains an invaluable and lengthy autobiographical sketch by Gadamer himself, long with wide-ranging critical and interpretive essays by twenty-nine scholars. The essays address the foundations of philosophical hermeneutics, the significance of beauty, art, and aesthetics to hermeneutic theory, theSocratic-Platonic sources of Gadamer's outlook, the relationship between Gadamer's hermeneutics and the characteristic perspectives of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, questions concerning Gadamer'sconnection to political affairs in twentieth-century Germany, and the nuances of Martin Heidegger's profound influence on Gadamer's thought. The essays divide evenly into those which take issue with Gadamer and those which interpretively and sympathetically elaborate on Gadamerian themes. Of the twenty-nine authors, twenty-six were teaching at North American colleges and universities at the time of writing.

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1999

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References

Note

1 Hanh, Thich Nhat, Call Me by My True Names (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1993).Google Scholar