Un altro Gadamer. Retrospettive per una futura ermeneutica

Another Gadamer. Retrospectives for a future hermeneutics - This essay outlines Gadamer’s view of philosophy as an unconditional freedom of questioning. In Wahrheit und Methode, which overshadowed both his earlier and later works, the primacy of question emerges as the major characteristic of his philosophy. New directions in hermeneutics show how research on Gadamer’s work could be enriched by neokantian and phenomenological approaches, in order to highlight another Gadamer, philosophically more distant from Heidegger. Socrates and Plato are the landmarks of this new way of interpreting Gadamer’s work, because they represent the political and ethical turn of western philosophy and hermeneutics itself. Their use of utopia, as a critical approach to reality, is an acknowledgment of the constitutive limit of thought. Gadamer’s concept of limit does not deny the concept of infinity, as Heidegger’s concept of limit did. In hermeneutics, finiteness encounters infinity in the hikanón, the point of convergence between interlocutors, where dialogue begins. These are the main conceptual knots, which philosophical hermeneutics, after Gadamer’s death, should analyse in depth, to propose another Gadamer.

Donatella Di Cesare, Un altro Gadamer. Retrospettive per una futura ermeneutica in "PARADIGMI" 3/2008, pp 21-28, DOI: