35 Facts About Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

In Truth and Method, Gadamer argued against the idea that meaning could be found through objective methods.

Hans-Georg Gadamer's work has become influential in communication ethics, contributing to the formulation of dialogic coordinates and promoting mutual understanding and learning in communication.

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

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

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

Hans-Georg 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.

Hans-Georg 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.

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

Shortly thereafter, Hans-Georg 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.

Hans-Georg Gadamer became close to Heidegger, and when Heidegger received a position at Marburg, Gadamer followed him there, where he became one of a group of students such as Leo Strauss, Karl Lowith, and Hannah Arendt.

Hans-Georg Gadamer studied Aristotle both under Edmund Husserl and under Heidegger.

Hans-Georg 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, Hans-Georg Gadamer was silent on Nazism, and he was not politically active during Nazi rule.

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

Hans-Georg Gadamer joined the National Socialist Teachers League in August 1933.

In 1933 Hans-Georg 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 Hans-Georg Gadamer's published works, that Hans-Georg Gadamer had supported the Nazis more than scholars had supposed.

Hans-Georg 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".

Hans-Georg Gadamer reduced his contact with Heidegger during the Nazi era.

Communist East Germany was no more to Hans-Georg 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.

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

Hans-Georg Gadamer was an Editorial Advisor of the journal Dionysius.

In 1968, Hans-Georg 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 Hans-Georg Gadamer renewed contact four years later during an international congress.

In 1981, Hans-Georg 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.

On 13 March 2002, Hans-Georg Gadamer died at Heidelberg's University Clinic at the age of 102.

Hans-Georg Gadamer is buried in the Kopfel cemetery in Ziegelhausen.

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

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

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

Hans-Georg 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".

For Hans-Georg Gadamer, interpreting a text involves a fusion of horizons.

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

Hans-Georg Gadamer added philosophical substance to the notion of human health.