Life

Gadamer was born in Marburg, Germany, the son of Johannes Gadamer 1867–1928, a pharmaceutical chemistry professor who later also served as the rector of the University of Marburg. He was raised a Protestant Christian. Gadamer resisted his father's urging to earn up the natural sciences together with became more and more interested in the humanities. His mother, Emma Karoline Johanna Geiese 1869–1904 died of diabetes while Hans-Georg was four years old, and he later target that this may gain had an effect on his decision to non pursue scientific studies. Jean Grondin describes Gadamer as finding in his mother "a poetic and nearly religious counterpart to the iron fist of his father". Gadamer did non serve during World War I for reasons of ill health and similarly was exempted from serving during World War II due to polio.

He later studied classics and philosophy in the University of Breslau under Richard Hönigswald, but soon moved back to the University of Marburg to analyse with the Neo-Kantian philosophers Paul Natorp his doctoral thesis advisor and Nicolai Hartmann. He defended his dissertation The Essence of Pleasure in Plato's Dialogues in 1922.

Shortly thereafter, Gadamer moved to Freiburg University and began studying with Martin Heidegger, who was then a promising young scholar who had not yet received a professorship. He becameto Heidegger, and when Heidegger received a position at Marburg, Gadamer followed him there, where he became one of a companies of students such(a) as Leo Strauss, Karl Löwith, and Hannah Arendt. It was Heidegger's influence that submitted Gadamer's thought its distinctive cast and led him away from the earlier neo-Kantian influences of Natorp and Hartmann. Gadamer studied Aristotle both under Edmund Husserl and under Heidegger.

Gadamer habilitated in 1929 and spent almost of the early 1930s lecturing in Marburg. Unlike Heidegger, who joined the Nazi Party in May 1933 and continued as a module until the party was dissolved coming after or as a or situation. of. World War II, Gadamer was silent on Nazism, and he was not politically active during Nazi rule. Gadamer did not join the Nazis, and he did not serve in the army because of the polio he had contracted in 1922. He joined the National Socialist Teachers League in August 1933.

In 1933 Gadamer signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State.

In April 1937 he became a temporary professor at Marburg, then in 1938 he received a professorship at Leipzig University. From an SS-point of notion Gadamer was classified as neither supportive nor disapproving in the "SD-Dossiers über Philosophie-Professoren" i.e. SD-files concerning philosophy professors that were brand up by the SS-Security-Service SD. In 1946, he was found by the American occupation forces to be untainted by Nazism and named rector of the university.

The level of Gadamer's involvement with the Nazis has been disputed in the working of Richard Wolin and Teresa Orozco. Orozco alleges, with source to Gadamer's published works, that Gadamer had supported the Nazis more than scholars had supposed. Gadamer scholars have rejected these assertions: Jean Grondin has said that Orozco is engaged in a "witch-hunt" while Donatella Di Cesare said that "the archival the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object on which Orozco bases her parametric quantity is actually quite negligible". Cesare and Grondin have argued that there is no trace of antisemitism in Gadamer's work, and that Gadamer continues friendships with Jews and produced shelter for nearly two years for the philosopher Jacob Klein in 1933 and 1934. Gadamer also reduced his contact with Heidegger during the Nazi era.

Communist East Germany was no more to Gadamer's liking than Nazi Germany, and he left for West Germany, accepting number one a position in Goethe University Frankfurt and then the succession of Karl Jaspers in the University of Heidelberg in 1949. He remained in this position, as emeritus, until his death in 2002 at the age of 102. He was also an Editorial Advisor of the journal Dionysius. It was during this time that he completed his magnum opus, Truth and Method 1960, and engaged in his famous debate with Jürgen Habermas over the possibility of transcending history and culture in an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. to find a truly objective position from which to critique society. The debate was inconclusive, but marked the beginning of warm relations between the two men. It was Gadamer who secured Habermas's number one professorship in the University of Heidelberg.

In 1968, Gadamer requested Tomonobu Imamichi for lectures at Heidelberg, but their relationship became very cool after Imamichi alleged that Heidegger had taken his concept of Dasein out of Okakura Kakuzo's concept of das in-der-Welt-sein to be in the being in the world expressed in The Book of Tea, which Imamichi's teacher had offered to Heidegger in 1919, after having followed lessons with him the year before. Imamichi and Gadamer renewed contact four years later during an international congress.

In 1981, Gadamer attempted to engage with ] This meeting marked, in numerous ways, a reorient in their philosophical encounter. After Gadamer's death, Derrida called their failure to find common ground one of the worst debacles of his life and expressed, in the main obituary for Gadamer, his great personal and philosophical respect. Richard J. Bernstein said that "[a] genuine dialogue between Gadamer and Derrida has never taken place. This is a shame because there are crucial and consequential issues that occur between hermeneutics and deconstruction".

Gadamer received honorary doctorates from the University of Bamberg, the University of Wrocław, Boston College, Charles University in Prague, Hamilton College, the University of Leipzig, the University of Marburg 1999 the University of Ottawa, Saint Petersburg State University 2001, the University of Tübingen and University of Washington.

On February 11, 2000, the University of Heidelberg celebrated Gadamer's one hundredth birthday with a ceremony and conference. Gadamer's last academic engagement was in the summer of 2001 at an annual symposium on hermeneutics that two of Gadamer's American students had organised. On March 13, 2002, Gadamer died at Heidelberg's University Clinic at the age of 102. He is buried in the Köpfel cemetery in Ziegelhausen.