People

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) Germany

Encyclopedia Entries

Hans-Georg Gadamer Encyclopedia Britannica

Gadamer, Hans-Georg Wikipedia

Reference Materials

Hans-George Gadamer Kevin Decker The Public Philosopher

Questions of Interpretation

Gadamer develops a hermeneutic according to which the meaning of any text is a function of the historical situations of both author and interpreter. Since each reading is grounded in its own context, no one reading offers a definitive or final interpretation of the text; the virtual dialogue continues indefinitely.

Reading

Dialogue and Dialectic : Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, P. Christopher Smith (Translator)

Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics, Joel Weinsheimer (Translator)

Plato's Dialectical Ethics : Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the Philebus, Robert M. Wallace (Translator)

The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, Robert Bernasconi (Editor)

Truth and Method  Joel C. Weinsheimer (Editor), Donald G. Marshall (Editor)

The Beginning of Knowledge

Kleine Schriften (Four volumes, 1972-79)

Philosophical Hermeneutics, (1976)

Reason in the Age of Science, (1981)

Quotations

"I think, then, that the chief task of philosophy is to justify this way of reason and to defend practical and political reason against the domination  of  technology  based  science.  That  is the point of philosophical hermeneutic. It corrects the peculiar falsehood of modern consciousness: the idolatry of scientific method and  the anonymous authority of the sciences and it vindicates again the noblest task of the citizen - decision-making according to one's own responsibility - instead of conceding  that  task to the expert.  In this  respect, hermeneutic philosophy is the heir of the older tradition of practical philosophy."  - Gadamer

Other Publications  
Hans-Georg Gadamer Jeff Malpas Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Commentaries

•  "Gadamer, Art, and Play" by G. T. Karnezis
• "'To Be Alive When Something Happens': Retrieving Dilthey's Erlebnis" by John Arthos
• "Process, Emergence, and Recursivity" by K.A. Murray
• "Interpretation Theory and the Teaching of Literature" by G. T. Karnezis
• "Gadamer Meets Bitzer" by Matthew Levy
• "From Textual Explication to Computer Understanding?" by J. C. Mallery
• "Education as the Normative Dimension of Philosophical Hermeneutics" by D. Blacker
• "On Gadamer's The Relevance of the Beautiful" by Benoit Baald
• "Gadamer: The Possibility of Interpretation" by Adam Davidow
• "Defusing Gadamer's Horizons" by Douglas Jones
• "A Brief History of Literary Theory II" by Chris Lang
• "Hermeneutics: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Tradition" by Nick Szabo
• "Preaching in a Postmodern Wor(l)d" by Jeffrey F. Bullock
• "The Dialogical Challenge to Verstehen" by Rob Shields
• Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, (1989)
• Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method, Joel Weinsheimer (1985)
• Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, Richard Bernstein (1983)
• Hermeneutics, Richard E. Palmer (1969)
• The Critical Circle, David Couzens Hoy (1978)

Links

• Gadamer page
• Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutic
• The Habermas-Gadamer Debate
• Ferrar's History of Hermeneutics: A Commentary
• "We're on a mission from Gad."
• A Brief History of Literary Theory
• Szabo's Hermeneutics page