Hans-Georg Gadamer 1900 – 2002

Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher and the founder of philosophical hermeneutics. A student of Husserl and Heidegger, he taught at Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Heidelberg, where his Truth and Method, published when he was sixty, became one of the major works of twentieth-century continental philosophy. He argued that all understanding takes place within a historically conditioned horizon, that prejudices in the form of inherited expectations are the precondition rather than the obstacle of interpretation, and that genuine understanding is a fusion of horizons. He lived to be a hundred and two.

Hans-Georg Gadamer was born in 1900 in Marburg, the son of a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry. He studied philosophy at Breslau and at Marburg, where he took his doctorate in 1922 under Paul Natorp and was deeply marked by the early lectures of Martin Heidegger. He habilitated at Marburg in 1929 with a study of Plato's dialectical ethics and held teaching posts at Marburg, Kiel, and Leipzig before being appointed to the chair at Frankfurt in 1947 and, in 1949, to Karl Jaspers's old chair at Heidelberg.

Gadamer's masterwork, Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode), appeared in 1960 after decades of preparatory studies of Plato, Hegel, Dilthey, and Heidegger. Around it grew a vast body of essays on art, language, the history of philosophy, and practical reason, much of it collected in the ten volumes of the Gesammelte Werke. He retired from Heidelberg in 1968 but continued to lecture and write for more than three decades.

His philosophical hermeneutics treats understanding not as a method to be applied but as the way human beings exist in language and tradition; its key motifs — the rehabilitation of prejudice, the fusion of horizons, the universality of the linguistic — set the agenda for late twentieth-century hermeneutics and shaped his long debates with Habermas, Derrida, and the social sciences. He died at Heidelberg in 2002, in his hundred and second year.