A German philosopher and student of Heidegger who lived past one hundred and renewed the art of interpretation. In Truth and Method, he showed that understanding a text, a work of art, or a person is always a dialogue. We never start from zero: we bring our tradition and our prejudices, and understanding arises from the meeting of horizons.
Core ideas
All understanding starts from prejudgments inherited from tradition
To understand is to fuse our horizon with the horizon of the text or the other
Language is the medium in which the world opens up to us
The tradition: Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics is reflection on interpretation and understanding. Gadamer turned it into a general philosophy: for him, interpreting is not a technique but the human way of being in the world.
