Abstract

Hans‐Georg Gadamer founded philosophical hermeneutics with his masterpiece Truth and Method. One of the achievements of Gadamer has been to make “hermeneutics” a household word in philosophical and intellectual debates. Gadamer's objective is to offer a philosophical justification of this type of knowledge, which does not depend on methodology alone, yet without opening the door to the accusation of relativism. Art offers Gadamer an attractive model for the way one should think of interpretation in general. Gadamer's hermeneutics had a profound and lasting influence on philosophy and all the human sciences, mainly history, literary theory, art history, jurisprudence, and theology. Especially influential were Gadamer's ideas on “The Possibility of a Philosophical Ethics”, where he called into question the primacy of Kant's ethics of duty and universal law to rediscover the essence of morality, with Aristotle and Hegel, in the realm of customs and traditions which guide us in everyday life.