Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses dialogue with two philosophers concerning either Hans-Georg Gadamer's relation to other contemporary philosophers such as Heidegger, Barthes, Ricoeur, Habermas, and Derrida or the current role of hermeneutics in scientific, cultural, or literary studies. It deals with a recent interview, published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, in which Gadamer talks most extensively about his early studies of Plato and the Socratic outlook. To enhance the wide range of essays on him and his contemporaries, the book contains a complete bibliography of his writings in English and a full bibliography of writings in English on him and hermeneutics. He showed how the aesthetic formulations of truth lead to the question of "understanding" in the human sciences. And out of the theory of hermeneutical experience, he formulated his own account of language as "the horizon of a hermeneutic ontology".