29 Facts About Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method, on hermeneutics.

Gadamer was born in Marburg, Germany, the son of Johannes Gadamer, a pharmaceutical chemistry professor who later served as the rector of the University of Marburg.

Gadamer resisted his father's urging to take up the natural sciences and became more and more interested in the humanities.

Jean Grondin describes Gadamer as finding in his mother "a poetic and almost religious counterpart to the iron fist of his father".

Gadamer did not serve during World War I for reasons of ill health and similarly was exempted from serving during World War II due to polio.

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Gadamer later studied classics and philosophy in the University of Breslau under Richard Honigswald, but soon moved back to the University of Marburg to study with the Neo-Kantian philosophers Paul Natorp and Nicolai Hartmann.

Gadamer defended his dissertation The Essence of Pleasure in Plato's Dialogues in 1922.

Shortly thereafter, Gadamer moved to Freiburg University and began studying with Martin Heidegger, who was then a promising young scholar who had not yet received a professorship.

Gadamer studied Aristotle both under Edmund Husserl and under Heidegger.

Gadamer habilitated in 1929 and spent most of the early 1930s lecturing in Marburg.

Unlike Heidegger, who joined the Nazi Party in May 1933 and continued as a member until the party was dissolved following World War II, Gadamer was silent on Nazism, and he was not politically active during Nazi rule.

Gadamer did not join the Nazis, and he did not serve in the army because of the polio he had contracted in 1922.

Gadamer joined the National Socialist Teachers League in August 1933.

In 1933 Gadamer signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State.

Orozco alleges, with reference to Gadamer's published works, that Gadamer had supported the Nazis more than scholars had supposed.

Gadamer scholars have rejected these assertions: Jean Grondin has said that Orozco is engaged in a "witch-hunt" while Donatella Di Cesare said that "the archival material on which Orozco bases her argument is actually quite negligible".

Gadamer reduced his contact with Heidegger during the Nazi era.

Communist East Germany was no more to Gadamer's liking than Nazi Germany, and he left for West Germany, accepting first a position in Goethe University Frankfurt and then the succession of Karl Jaspers in the University of Heidelberg in 1949.

Gadamer remained in this position, as emeritus, until his death in 2002 at the age of 102.

In 1968, Gadamer invited Tomonobu Imamichi for lectures at Heidelberg, but their relationship became very cool after Imamichi alleged that Heidegger had taken his concept of Dasein out of Okakura Kakuzo's concept of das in-der-Welt-sein expressed in The Book of Tea, which Imamichi's teacher had offered to Heidegger in 1919, after having followed lessons with him the year before.

Imamichi and Gadamer renewed contact four years later during an international congress.

In 1981, Gadamer attempted to engage with Jacques Derrida at a conference in Paris but it proved less enlightening because the two thinkers had little in common.

Gadamer received honorary doctorates from the University of Bamberg, the University of Wroclaw, Boston College, Charles University in Prague, Hamilton College, the University of Leipzig, the University of Marburg the University of Ottawa, Saint Petersburg State University, the University of Tubingen and University of Washington.

Gadamer's goal was to uncover the nature of human understanding.

In Truth and Method, Gadamer argued that "truth" and "method" were at odds with one another.

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However, Gadamer argued meaning and understanding are not objects to be found through certain methods, but are inevitable phenomena.

Gadamer intended Truth and Method to be a description of what we always do when we interpret things : "My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing".

The German-language edition of Gadamer's Collected Works includes a volume in which Gadamer elaborates his argument and discusses the critical response to the book.

Gadamer added philosophical substance to the notion of human health.