Abstract

A significant feature of current intellectual life in Europe is the proliferation of high level colloquia, different from the routine meetings of professional or erudite organizations in that they represent authentic team reflection and common intellectual growth through dialogue among the participants. These Roman conversations sponsored by the Istituto di Studi Filosofici, University of Rome, began in 1945, and their topics have continually increased in relevance for the philosophical community at large as international participation grew and concern for vital problems of contemporary man became the basis for discussions. The contributions in this volume center around problems brought to the fore by the influential work of H. G. Gadamer in Wahrheit und Methode, although this author, a frequent contributor to other volumes in this series, does not appear in this particular one. The papers are all variations on the theme of temporal distance as the ground of constructive comprehension. Paul Ricœur and A. De Waelhens have the least circumstantial contributions in this excellent array of authors, many of whom have been doing concurrent work in hermeneutics long before this method and its philosophical repercussions had any notoriety. Within the vast field of semantic research, which has been crisscrossed in every direction by all schools of thought in modernity, these authors are developing the hypothesis of a transcendentalism without a subject. These studies can be pointed to as palpable proof that the generative transformational tendencies and the symbolic tendencies in linguistics can be integrated. In this sense it is significant that ideas from the Anthropologie Structurale of C. Levi-Strauss come up often in the text.—A. M.