1 HANS-GEORG GADAMER
Nicholas H. Smith
Hans-Georg Gadamer (b.1900) was raised in Breslau, Silesia, then on the prosperous eastern fringe of the German Empire. His father was an accomplished professor of pharmaceutical chemistry, and while Hans-Georg would also go on to lead the life of learning, from an early age his passion was for the ‘human’ rather than the ‘natural’ sciences. In 1919 Gadamer went to Marburg University to study philosophy and philology. After completing his doctorate on Plato’s concept of desire, in 1923 he went to study under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg. Gadamer was spellbound by Heidegger and continued to work with him after Heidegger’s move to Marburg later that year. When Heidegger returned to Freiburg in 1927, Gadamer was just completing his Habilitationshrift, a phenomenological reading of Plato eventually published as Plato’s Dialectical Ethics (1931). Gadamer was caught off guard by Hitler’s rise to power, but unlike his Jewish friends and colleagues, such as Karl LØwith, he was able to adapt to the new regime and would even prosper under it professionally. In January 1939 Gadamer was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, where he remained until his resignation in 1947, soon to be succeeded by the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. After a brief stay in Frankfurt, in 1949 Gadamer took up the chair vacated by Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg, a position he would occupy until his retirement twenty years later. Although Gadamer wrote continuously throughout his career, it was not until 1960, with the publication of his magnum opus Truth and Method, that he made a decisive contribution to the broad tradition of critical theory. In this work, Gadamer outlined the essential features of what he called ‘philosophical hermeneutics’. Gadamer has also written many essays (most of them transcriptions of