Hans-Georg Gadamer is often criticized for his account of the fusions of horizons as the ideal resolution of dialogue. I argue that in fact it is an excellent account of the successful resolution of dialogue, but only in light of a proper understanding of what Gadamer means by 'horizon' and how then horizons are fused. I do this by showing how Gadamer is drawing on the technical sense of 'horizon' found in Edmund Husserl's and Martin Heidegger's phenomenologies. In the process (...) I show why a prominent criticism of Gadamer's account of the fusion of horizons, a criticism presented most forcefully by E. D. Hirsch, is mistaken. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with Gadamer’s reflections on solidarity and practice as found in several of his later writings. While Gadamer offers a robust explanation of practice, practical reason, and how both are operative in solidarities, his investigations of solidarity are in no way systematic. He does, however, distinguish two aspects of solidarity, viz. what one might call “natural solidarity” and “avowed solidarity”. In contrast to natural solidarities, avowed solidarities require an intentional decision and commitment to act with others for (...) a common cause. Since Gadamer’s writings on solidarity are more sketches than detailed treatises, we will bring his work into dialogue with feminist and political philosopher Sally Scholz. Scholz has devoted significant research to the concept of political solidarity. Like Gadamer, Scholz too is concerned with how we engage natural others and how our present practices harm and exploit them. By bringing Scholz’s and Gadamer’s work into dialogue, we gain a better understanding of different facets and types of solidarity, how they interrelate and influence one other, and how their interrelations might help to effect positive social and political changes for all who inhabit this world. (shrink)

This paper sets out an account of hermeneutics as essentially ‘topological’ in character at the same time as it also argues that hermeneutics has a key role to play in making clear the nature of the topological. At the centre of the argument is the idea that place and understanding are intimately connected, that this is what determines the interconnection between topology and hermeneutics, and that this also implies an intimate belonging-together of place and thinking, of place and experience, of (...) place and the very possibility of appearance, of presence, of being. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s critique of modernity, and his vision of what may come after it, constitutes a sustained argument across the arc of his career. Does Hans-Georg Gadamer follow Heidegger’s path of making possible “another beginning” after the modern age? In this article, I show that, in contrast to Heidegger, Gadamer cultivates modernity’s hidden resources. We can gain insight into Gadamer’s difference from Heidegger on this fundamental point with reference to his ambivalence toward and departure from two of Heidegger’s touchstones for (...) postmodernity, namely, Friedrich Nietzsche and Friedrich Hölderlin. We can appreciate and motivate Gadamer’s proposal to rehabilitate modernity by juxtaposing his rootedness in Wilhelm Dilthey and Rainer Maria Rilke with Heidegger’s corresponding interest in Nietzsche and Hölderlin. This difference in influences and conceptual starting points demonstrates Heidegger and Gadamer’s competing approaches to the modern age, a contrast that I concretize through a close reading of Gadamer’s choice of a poem by Rilke as the epigraph to Truth and Method. (shrink)

In this essay, the author argues that Gadamer's approach to world literature contributes to the call for us mutually to discover our solidarities with those from different traditions, and, thus also, different linguistic traditions. He holds that the discovery of global solidarities is urgent because current prospects to address the world's political, social and economic challenges have been put in jeopardy by the increasingly ubiquitous use of calculative rationality to manage human relations. Gadamer's concern for us to discover solidarities, however, (...) concerns not first that we ally ourselves with some political identity, ideal, or cause, but, rather, that we allow ourselves to become visible to one another in our respective exteriority as finite, free beings. In this context, the author seeks to show that world literature may contribute to the discovery of solidarities by bringing us into such visibility on a global scale. (shrink)