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HANS-GEORG GADAMER'S TRUTH AND METHOD: A REVIEW ARTICLE* I N THE PHILOSOPHICAL tradition the term ' hermeneutics ' has referred principally to the set of problems centering around the interpretation of texts, especially religious and legal texts. With the rise of methodical historical scholarship in the nineteenth century the problems of ' reconstructing ' past ages, epochs, periods, of obtaining 'objective' historical knowledge, also became part of the general hermeneutical problematic. However, on the level of self-reflection, the so-called human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) were unsure just what kinds of things they were, for, unlike the empirical natural sciences that had been subjected to rigorous analysis by Kant, they apparently did not, and could not, utilize the procedures and categorial apparatus of the empirical natural sciences themselves. Kant was aware of this, but his treatment of the problems was never really accepted as constituting a satisfactory framework for their self-understanding. Ranke and Droysen devoted themselves to methodological reflections as well as to empirical historical research as they tried to delineate the essential contours of historical knowledge. Dilthey followed in their wake and characterized his own project by an explicit parallel between his projected critique of historical reason and the Kantian critique of pure (scientific) reason. His was the first attempt to raise the human sciences to a universal methodological consciousness of themselves and to situate them, precisely and in depth, over against those modes of knowing proper to the investigation of inanimate nature. It is Gadamer's intention in the present volume to take this problem complex back to its ultimate foundations and to transform it from a specifically ' epistemological ' and ' methodological ' issue into one dealing with the very conditions of the possibility of understanding itself. Indeed, under the rubric of a philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer wants to construct, by means of a phenomenological analysis, a proper model for grasping the act of human understanding and to delineate the ultimate matrices in which the act takes place. In such a procedure he joins a phenomenology of understanding to an ontology. It is his belief that "Heidegger's *Truth and Method. By Hans-Georg Gadamer. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. Pp. xvi + 588. $22-60. 311 312 ROBERT E. INNIS temporal analytics of human existence (Dasein) has, I think, shown convincingly that understanding is not just one of the various possible behaviours of the subject, but the mode of being of Therebeing itself" (p. xviii). The present book is meant to be Gadamer's major contribution to the clarification of this mode of being, and consequently it must be understood in the root anthropological sense as an inquiry into ourselves and into the foundations of our intercourse with the world. The book itself is so massive-a veritable Alexandrian librarythat in a review of this sort I can basically only touch upon certain topics that run throughout it. I will return elsewhere to a more specific treatment of the present volume and problems arising from it. I will here try to schematize the operative core of the book and the fundamental model of understanding that Gadamer has constructed -or discerned-by his phenomenological analysis. I will divide what follows into four sections. Section one will deal with Gadamer's reformulation of the hermeneutical problem. Section two will concentrate on the model itself-principally that of Spiel-around which Gadamer builds his analysis of understanding. Section three will be devoted to the linguistic matrix of understanding and the world. Section four will offer some critical comments upon Gadamer's project as a whole. I. Gadamer's Conception of Hermeneutics Gadamer explicitly differentiates his conception of hermeneutics from a Methodenlehre, whose goal would be the formulation of rules of procedure to guide us to' objective' knowledge in the interpretation of texts or in historical research. In fact, the very title of the book has an ironical twist to it, for Gadamer's project is to investigate that region that lies beyond the methodical impulse itself and, in a sense, makes it possible. As he writes in the introduction , " From its historical origin, the problem of hermeneutics goes beyond the limits that the concept of method sets to modern science. The understanding and the interpretation of...

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