ABSTRACT

Hans-Georg Gadamer is arguably the most significant German philosopher in the 20th century except for Martin Heidegger. Gadamer is a philologist, philosopher, and literary critic, and he has written about some major poets in the German literary tradition, including Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist, Stefan George, and Rilke, as well as less well known poets such as Hans Carossa and Hilde Domin. Although he began with thinking about Heidegger’s work on interpretation (hermeneutics), Gadamer’s best-known contribution emerged from his efforts to establish what he called “philosophical hermeneutics,” and this project manifested in comprehensive fashion in Wahrheit und Methode (1960; Truth and Method). Thus, Gadamer needs to be seen as a figure within the tradition of hermeneutics, and as someone who helped to broaden the scope of hermeneutics beyond the problems and strategies of interpretation that were connected to biblical and classical studies.