ABSTRACT
Hans-Georg Gadamer was born in 1900 in Marburg, Germany. He held positions in many German universities, including Marburg, Kiel, Leipzig, Frankfurt-am-Main and Heidelberg. The most famous of Gadamer’s insights stem from his critique of the historicist procedures of those thinkers who came before him. For Gadamer, prejudice is not an intellectual vice but a necessary condition for the possibility of understanding. His history of effects has had dramatic repercussions in biblical studies. Another key feature of Gadamer’s ontology of understanding is that the majority of our prejudgments are opaque to us. He is not, however, entirely denying agency of the individual, making human beings the automatons of tradition. Gadamer sharply criticizes Wilhelm Dilthey’s inductive procedure as inadequate. His notion of understanding, which is always also interpretation, occurs in the event of dialogue, which Gadamer poetically describes as a fusion of horizons.
