ABSTRACT
The author developed a number of conversations that took place at the Fourth International Conference on Value and Virtue in Practice-Based Research, the twin themes of which were openness and criticality. The author approaches the twin themes of openness and criticality through a consideration of what he calls the interpretive tradition: the tradition, that is, of philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer's notion of horizon' relates directly to the importance he places in tradition as the legacy of the past to the future and the corresponding debt owed by the present to the past. Implicit in Gadamer's critique of method is the idea that understanding involves self-formation and human flourishing that is open-ended in the extent and scope of its proliferation. Gadamer spent his life as a philosopher trying to make sense of this in-between space of human interchange. Gadamer's starting point in Truth and Method is the problem of method' as he terms it.
