Abstract

The dissertation investigates whether Gadamer's hermeneutics is committed to a certain kind of relativism, given his account of how the historicity of understanding is part of the ontological structure of human existence. The dissertation argues that the historicity of understanding is the non-relativistic transcendental foundation of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. ;Critics charge that Gadamer fails to identify a norm or a criterion by which it would be possible to determine the objectivity of an interpretation. Debates on this matter center on two fundamental issues: If philosophical hermeneutics starts with the principle of historicity of understanding, relativism, it is argued, is inevitable, since all understanding is historically conditioned. According to this argument, espoused by Emilio Betti and E. D. Hirsch, objectivity of meaning is not reducible to the conditions determining the investigation. Other critics, such as Jurgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, argue that if the understanding is always historical, it would be impossible to take a critical stance towards history or traditions. These critics fault Gadamer for appealing to tradition as a criterion for judgments concerning social practices. ;In contrast to these interpretations, this dissertation argues that the ontological claims of hermeneutic theory and the concept of historicity must be related to the transcendental project of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. The historicity of understanding and the linguistic nature of understanding belong to ontological conditions of human existence in the sense that both the finiteness of human understanding and the potentially infinite scope of language share the same fundamental grounding. Philosophical hermeneutics, based on the finite and historical nature of human experience of the world, develops a concept of the experience of truth capable of meeting these conditions. ;In the first chapter, the problem of relativism associated with the historicity of understanding is presented. The next two chapters address the relation between ontology and the historicity of understanding, articulated in Gadamer's works. In the fourth chapter, scholarly responses to Gadamer's hermeneutics are examined. In chapter five, the relations between understanding and language, the experience of temporality and the historicity are elaborated, in order to argue that charge of relativism cannot be sustained.