ABSTRACT
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s readers are often uneasy about the role that essences play in his hermeneutic philosophy. Some complain that, while Gadamer’s better insights should have led him to abandon appeals to essences, he nevertheless remains a ‘closet essentialist.’ Others may have the opposite worry—that his view is insufficiently essentialist—and they are likely to argue that while he pays lip service to the idea that things have essences, he is nevertheless unable to make good on this idea. This chapter argues that both sorts of unease arise from a failure to appreciate how Gadamer’s conception of essences is wedded to his understanding of meaning as an event. For Gadamer, as for Aristotle and much of the tradition, the essence of a thing is the answer to a particular sort of question about why that thing is the way that it is. Gadamer affirms without winking that such questions have real, non-arbitrary answers. However, unlike much of the tradition, Gadamer insists that the meaning of a question, including a question about something’s essence, is always dependent on the particular situation in which it is asked. Essences therefore can and must present themselves differently if they are to come to presentation at all.
