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Hans-Georg Gadamer

Hans-Georg GadamerHans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002).

Gadamer was born in Marburg, Germany, as the son of a pharmaceutical chemist who later also served as the rector of the university there. Gadamer resisted his father’s urging to take up the natural sciences and grew more and more interested in the humanities. He grew up and studied in Breslau under Hönigswald, but soon moved back to Marburg to study with the neo-Kantian philosophers Paul Natorp and Nicolai Hartmann. He defended his dissertation in 1922.

Shortly thereafter, Gadamer visited Freiburg and began studying with Martin Heidegger, who was then a promising young scholar who had not yet received a professorship. He thus became one of a group of students such as Leo Strauss, Karl Löwith, and Hannah Arendt. He and Heidegger became close, and when Heidegger received a position at Marburg, Gadamer followed him there. It was Heidegger’s influence that gave Gadamer’s thought its distinctive cast and led him away from the earlier neo-Kantian influences of Natorp and Hartmann.

Gadamer habilitated in 1929 and spent most of the early 1930s lecturing in Marburg. Unlike Heidegger, Gadamer was strongly anti-Nazi, although he was not politically active during the Third Reich. He did not receive a paid position during the Nazi years and never entered the Party; only towards the end of the War did he receive an appointment at Leipzig. In 1946, he was found to be untainted by Nazism by the American occupation forces and named rector of the university. Communist East Germany was little more to Gadamer’s liking than the Third Reich, and he left for West Germany, accepting first a position in Frankfurt am Main and then the succession of Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg in 1949. He remained in this position, as emeritus, until his death in 2002.

It was during this time that he completed his magnum opus Truth and Method (in 1960) and engaged in his famous debate with Jürgen Habermas over the possibility of transcending history and culture in order to find a truly objective position to criticize society from. The debate was inconclusive, but marked the beginning of warm relations between the two men. It was Gadamer who secured Habermas’s first professorship in Heidelberg. Another attempt to engage Jacques Derrida proved less enlightening because the two thinkers had so little in common that it proved impossible to find common ground, but after Gadamer’s death, Derrida has called this one of the worst debacles of his life and expressed, in the main obituary for Gadamer, his great personal and philosophical respect.

Table of Contents

  • 1 Major Works of Hans-Georg Gadamer
    • 1.1 Related:
  • 2 Videos
  • 3 Related Products
    • 3.1 Truth and Method (Bloomsbury Revelations)
    • 3.2 Philosophical Hermeneutics, 30th Anniversary Edition
    • 3.3 Truth and Method
    • 3.4 By Hans-Georg Gadamer - Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) (New Ed) (9/15/04)
    • 3.5 Truth and Method   [TRUTH & METHOD REV/E 2/E] [Paperback]
    • 3.6 Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies
    • 3.7 The Beginning of Philosophy (Bloomsbury Revelations)
    • 3.8 Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography (Yale Studies in Hermeneutics)
    • 3.9 The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays
    • 3.10 The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer

Major Works of Hans-Georg Gadamer

– Philosophical Hermeneutics (1976)
– Reason in the Age of Science (1976)
– Hegel’s Dialectic (1976)
– Dialogue and Dialectic (1980)
– Philosophical Apprenticeships (1985)
– The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (1986)
– Truth and Method (1989)
– Plato’s Dialectical Ethics (1991)
– Applied Hermeneutics: … on Education, Poetry, and History (1992)
– Heidegger’s Ways (1994)
– Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue (1994)
– The Enigma of Health (1996)

Related:

  • hermeneutics
  • Martin Heidegger
  • Abandonment (existentialism)
  • existentialism
  • Thomas Reid

  • Videos

  • Related Products

     
    Truth and Method (Bloomsbury Revelations)

    Truth and Method (Bloomsbury Revelations)

    • Gadamer, Hans-Georg (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 664 Pages - 06/27/2013 (Publication Date) - Bloomsbury Academic (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
     
    Philosophical Hermeneutics, 30th Anniversary Edition

    Philosophical Hermeneutics, 30th Anniversary Edition

    • University of California Press
    • Hans-Georg Gadamer (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 304 Pages - 07/08/2008 (Publication Date) - University of California Press (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
     
    Truth and Method

    Truth and Method

    • Used Book in Good Condition
    • Hans-Georg Gadamer (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 594 Pages - 06/01/2004 (Publication Date) - Continuum (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
     
    By Hans-Georg Gadamer - Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) (New Ed) (9/15/04)

    By Hans-Georg Gadamer - Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) (New Ed) (9/15/04)

    • Hans-Georg Gadamer (Author)
    • 09/15/2004 (Publication Date) - Continuum (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
     
    Truth and Method   [TRUTH & METHOD REV/E 2/E] [Paperback]

    Truth and Method   [TRUTH & METHOD REV/E 2/E] [Paperback]

    • Gadamer, Hans-Georg (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 594 Pages - 04/19/1991 (Publication Date) - Crossroad Publishing Corporation (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
     
    Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies

    Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies

    • Gadamer, Hans-Georg (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 117 Pages - 09/10/1982 (Publication Date) - Yale University Press (Publisher)
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    The Beginning of Philosophy (Bloomsbury Revelations)

    The Beginning of Philosophy (Bloomsbury Revelations)

    • Gadamer, Hans-Georg (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 128 Pages - 10/20/2016 (Publication Date) - Bloomsbury Academic (Publisher)
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    Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography (Yale Studies in Hermeneutics)

    Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography (Yale Studies in Hermeneutics)

    • Hardcover Book
    • Grondin, Jean (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 528 Pages - 04/10/2003 (Publication Date) - Yale University Press (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
     
    The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays

    The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays

    • Used Book in Good Condition
    • Gadamer, Hans-Georg (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 218 Pages - 02/27/1987 (Publication Date) - Cambridge University Press (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
     
    The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer

    The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer

    • Hardcover Book
    • Walhof, Darren (Author)
    • English (Publication Language)
    • 145 Pages - 12/01/2016 (Publication Date) - Palgrave Macmillan (Publisher)
    Check Price on Amazon
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