Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1900–2002)

Hans-Georg Gadamer made a substantial contribution to hermeneutic philosophy. Born in 1900 in Marburg, he studied under Martin Heidegger and also attended the lectures of Edmund Husserl. Gadamer's professional life was spent mainly in Germany, although after his retirement from his Chair in Philosophy at Heidelberg in 1968 he took up various visiting posts abroad. In the course of the 1970s sociologists became increasingly interested in hermeneutics, hence there was a growing interest in Gadamer's writings. Gadamer's main book is Truth and Method (1960 [trans. 1975]). In this book, Gadamer distanced himself from the emphasis on method in nineteenthcentury hermeneutics; like Heidegger, Gadamer heralded the “ontological turn.” He criticized philosophers of the Enlightenment for failing to appreciate the pivotal role of tradition in knowledge acquisition. He saw understanding as a dialogical process in which we draw on our presuppositions to make sense of other people, but these presuppositions are themselves affected by this encounter. Gadamer talked about a “fusion of horizons” to hint at the dialogical nature of the interaction between the reader and the text, or the observer and observed. Gadamer applied his hermeneutic approach to medicine and medical practice in The Enigma of Health (1996 [trans. 1993]).

In the late 1960s, Jürgen Habermas engaged in a debate with Gadamer. For Habermas, Gadamer was right to point out the limitations of positivism, but his plea for hermeneutic understanding lacks a critical edge. Gadamer's reply was that Habermas failed to acknowledge that his own critical standpoint is itself embedded in tradition. Later, Richard Rorty's argument for an edifying philosophy, beyond epistemology, drew on Gadamer's dialogical model. Gadamer also inspired Charles Taylor's philosophy of social sciences, in particular its reflexive component.

PATRICK BAERT

game theory

This is a mathematical tool for modeling social conflict and cooperation among two or more players, where payoffs for a given strategy depend in part on the strategies of other players.