Gadamer, Hans-Georg

Gadamer, Hans-Georg (häns` gā`ôrk gă`dəmər), 1900–2002, German philosopher, b. Marburg. He taught at Kiel (1934–37), Marburg (1937–39), Leipzig (1939–74), and Frankfurt (1947–49) before becoming a professor at the Univ. of Heidelberg (1949–68). Influenced by his teacher Martin Heidegger, he made a major contribution to hermeneutics. In his most influential work, Truth and Method (1960, tr. 1975), Gadamer argued that a historian's own situation plays a role in determining the content of his or her interpretation of a historical event, i.e., a historian's own "prejudices" constitute necessary conditions for historical understanding. Gadamer envisaged a task of hermeneutics to be analysis of such prejudices—how they are constituted through language and how they evolve. His other works include Plato's Dialectical Ethics (1931, tr. 1991) and Philosophical Hermeneutics (3 vol., 1967–72, tr. 1976).

Bibliography

See Philosophical Apprenticeships (1977, tr. 1985), his autobiography; G. Warnke, Gadamer (1987).

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Gadamer, Hans-Georg

(born Feb. 11, 1900, Marburg, Ger.—died March 13, 2002, Heidelberg) German philosopher whose system of philosophical hermeneutics, derived in part from the ideas of Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, was influential in 20th-century Continental philosophy, aesthetics, theology, and literary criticism. The son of a chemistry professor, Gadamer studied the humanities at the universities of Breslau, Marburg, Freiburg, and Munich, earning a doctorate in philosophy under Heidegger at Freiburg in 1922. He later taught at the universities of Frankfurt am Main (1947–49) and Heidelberg (from 1949), where he became professor emeritus in 1968. In his most important work, Truth and Method (1960), Gadamer developed a general theory of understanding and interpretation modeled on the experience of art.