Bloomsbury Revelations
3 total works
Gadamer explores the layers of interpretation and misinterpretation that have built up over 2500 years of pre-socratic scholarship. Moving from Simplicius and Diogenes Laertius to the 19th-century German historicists to Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, Gadamer presents here his work on philosophy before Plato and Aristotle and one of only a few extended treatments of the pre-socratics in his entire body of work.
Written in the 1960s, TRUTH AND METHOD is Gadamer's magnum opus. Looking behind the self-consciousness of science, he discusses the tense relationship between truth and methodology. In examining the different experiences of truth, he aims to "present the hermeneutic phenomenon in its fullest extent.
In this work Gadamer reminds us that philosophy for the Greeks was not just a question of metaphysics and epistemology but encompassed cosmology, physics, mathematics, medicine and the entire reach of theoretical curiosity and intellectual mastery. Whereas Gadamer's book "The Beginning of Philosophy" dealt with the inception of philosophical inquiry, this book brings together nearly all of his previously published but never translated essays on the Presocratics. Beginning with a hermeneutical and philological investigation of the Heraclitus fragments (1974 and 1990), he then moves on to a discussion of the Greek Atomists (1935) and the Presocratic cosmologists (1964). In the last two essays (1978 and 1994/95), Gadamer elaborates on the profound debt that modern scientific thinking owes to the Greek philosophical tradition.