1. Gadamer’s Hidden Doctrine: The Simplicity and Humility of Philosophy James Risser
In a conversation with Riccardo Dottori conducted around the time of his hundredth year, HansGeorg Gadamer speaks about many of the issues that over time have shaped his project of a philosophical hermeneutics. Surprisingly, there is little discussion of the specific issues developed in Truth and Method, the book published forty years earlier that established Gadamer once and for all as a philosopher for the twentieth century. Instead, we see once again how Gadamer relies on Greek sources to clarify issues such as the character of hermeneutic finitude, the ethical and the rhetorical dimensions of philosophical hermeneutics, and the nature of philosophy itself as it is practiced through hermeneutics. Of course, the content and the direction of the conversation was dictated by the initial framework for discussion, which was for Gadamer to consider “what remains valid within the philosophical and cultural tradition, or what is still to be salvaged from its highest invention—metaphysics—after the two attempts of dismantling it emanating from Heidegger and analytic philosophy.”1 In this context the opportunity to directly reflect upon the importance of Truth and Method did not present itself, but the ensuing conversation is telling nonetheless. From it we have added confirmation of what we read in other published interviews and in Gadamer’s own self-critique published in his collected works: hermeneutics and Greek philosophy always remained the two foci of his work, and, regarding hermeneutics, the problem of understanding in the historical human sciences—a problem that appears to be the overriding concern of Truth and Method—was not in fact his only goal.2 He