Gadamer and the Question of Understanding: Between Heidegger and Derrida (en Inglés)
Reseña del libro "Gadamer and the Question of Understanding: Between Heidegger and Derrida (en Inglés)"
Hans-Georg Gadamer is depicted as a paradoxical figure in the literature. When his work is approached by itself, outside the history of hermeneutics, he is generally presented as the disciple of Martin Heidegger whose main theoretical contribution lies in having transposed his ontological hermeneutics into the sphere of the human sciences. Usually the master-student relation ends with a break between the two brought about by the student s desire to become herself a master. In Gadamer and Heidegger s case the possibility of such a symbolic parricide has always excluded by the scholarship. When Gadamer s work is approached in context, in the history of hermeneutics the position of the literature changes radically and he, not Heidegger, is revered as the central figure of hermeneutic theory in the 20th century, his teacher s work s well as those of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Dilthey his immediate forerunners being regarded as mere preambles to the great hermeneutic theory proposed by Truth and Method. While the works of those following him as addenda or footnotes to it. In most histories and historical introductions, textbooks and anthologies of hermeneutics the texts chosen as indicative for the subsequent development of hermeneutics after Truth and Method are texts relating in a direct manner to Gadamer s work if not dedicated explicitly and exclusively to it. The present book aims to dismantle this paradox by showing, on the one hand, that Gadamer s translation of Heidegger involved, as he himself says, a series of essential alterations to the original which make philosophical hermeneutics a more coherent and better articulated hermeneutic theory, one offering a more faithful description of the phenomenon of understanding than Heidegger s. And, on the other hand, by taking the dossier of the famous encounter between Gadamer and Derrida as its cue, it aims to show that this does nevertheless not mean that it would be an unsurpassable achievement in the field. For, in light of Derrida s deconstruction, it becomes apparent that, although necessary, every step forward from Heidegger as well as from Schleiermacher and Dilthey Gadamer takes is problematic in itself."
