ABSTRACT
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1968, p. 69) has remarked that philosophy ‘leaves everything as it is’. The implication of this view is that philosophy does not change the world. This theme is also present, in a somewhat different way, in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s view of his own philosophical hermeneutics. As Gadamer writes in Truth and Method:
The hermeneutics developed here is not…a methodology of the human sciences, but an attempt to understand what the human sciences truly are, beyond their methodological self-consciousness, and what connects them with the totality of our experience of the world…it is not my intention to make prescriptions for the sciences or the conduct of life, but to try to correct false thinking about what they are.
