Hans-Georg Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer (b. 1900–d. 2002) is known primarily for establishing philosophical hermeneutics as an important movement in contemporary philosophy. What is remarkable about Gadamer’s very large body of work is the paucity of published books. As was required for an academic career, Gadamer published his habilitation, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, in 1931 (see Gadamer 1985a, cited under Gadamer’s Collected Works in German). He did not publish another book until 1960, when his main work, Truth and Method (Gadamer 1989b, cited under Gadamer’s Principal Works in English Translation), appeared. Almost all of Gadamer’s published work before and after 1960 is “occasional,” i.e., based on lectures and addresses. Some of these lectures and addresses were expanded into short monographs that were published in book form—among them, The Relevance of the Beautiful (Gadamer 1986b), and The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy (Gadamer 1986a), both cited under Gadamer’s Principal Works in English Translation). Between 1986 and 1995, Gadamer put together his Collected Works (Gesammelte Werke) in ten volumes that contain most but not all of his published work prior to 1995 (see Gadamer’s Collected Works in German). Gadamer made himself available for numerous interviews that provide insight into his work and into a century of German intellectual history.