The Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, 2nd Edition

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GADAMER, HANS-GEORG (1900–2002) One of the most important twentieth-century German hermeneutic philosophers, who argues vehemently against the notion that finding the truth is a matter of applying the right method. In his groundbreaking and ironically titled study Truth and Method, Gadamer delineates and complicates German hermeneutics in a compelling engagement with Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Martin Heidegger. The basis of Gadamer's argument consists in recognizing that perspectivity or horizonality cannot be avoided. In other words, there is no neutral perspective that would reveal the world or a text as it really is. Instead, one is always already situated within a horizon of familiarity (such as tradition, what ...