This excellent collection contains 13 essays from Gadamer'sKleine Schriften,dealing with hermeneutical reflection, phenomenology, existential philosophy, and ...

A revised translation of Heidegger's most important work.

Heidegger, the founder of the hermeneutic paradigm, rejected the traditional account of cultural activity as a search for universally valid foundations for human action and knowledge. His main work, Sein und Zeit, develops a holistic epistemology according to which all meaning is context-dependent and permanently anticipated from a particular horizon, perspective or background of intelligibility. The result is a powerful critique directed against the ideal of objectivity. Gadamer shares with Heidegger the hermeneutic reflections developed in Sein und Zeit and the (...) critique of objectivity, describing the cultural activity as an endless process of "fusions of horizons." On the one hand, this is an echo of the Heideggerian holism, namely, of the thesis that all meaning depends on a particular interpretative context. On the other hand, however, this concept is an attempt to cope with the relativity of human existence and to avoid the dangers of a radical relativism. In fact, through an endless, free and unpredictable process of fusions of horizons, our personal horizon is gradually expanded and deprived of its distorting prejudices in such a way that the educative process consists in this multiplication of hermeneutic experiences. Gadamer succeeds therefore in presenting a non-foundationalist and non-teleological theory of culture. (shrink)

Written in the 1960s, TRUTH AND METHOD is Gadamer's magnum opus.

This monograph examines the philosophical debate between Habermas and Gadamer on the nature of the social. It places the debate in its context, outlining the origins of the debate and the disputed territory of truth and method.

The claim that all human thought involves "interpretation," that all human thought is in some way relative to a contingent context of cognitive, theoretical, practical, and aesthetic considerations, has become widely accepted, but waht we understand by "truth" and how we should best pursue it are questions raised with renewed force once a hermeneutical starting point has been embraced. Brice R. Wachterhauser's collection Hermeneutics and Truth is an attempt to contribute to this concersation. No thinkers have wrestled with the issue (...) of truth and interpretation in more illuminating ways for the Continental tradition of philosophy than Heidegger and Gadamer. Hermeneutics and Truth is a dual focus on Heidegger and Gadamer, but it concentrates primarily on Gadamer's efforts to think through the issue of truth for hermeneutics and only secondaily on Heidegger's thought on this issue. (shrink)