Hans-Georg Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer (/ˈɡɑːdəmər/; German: [ˈɡaːdamɐ]; February 11, 1900 – March 13, 2002) was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode) on hermeneutics.

Hans-Georg Gadamer
Hans-Georg Gadamer, c. 2000
Born	(1900-02-11)February 11, 1900 Marburg, German Empire
Died	March 13, 2002(2002-03-13) (aged 102) Heidelberg, Germany
Alma mater	University of Breslau University of Marburg
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental philosophy Hermeneutics Ontological hermeneutics[1] Hermeneutic phenomenology[2]
Institutions	University of Marburg (1928–1938) Leipzig University (1938–1948) Goethe University Frankfurt (1948–1949) University of Heidelberg (1949–2002)
Thesis	The Nature of Pleasure According to Plato's Dialogues (1922)
Doctoral advisor	Paul Natorp
Notable students	Charles Guignon
Main interests	Metaphysics Epistemology Language Ontology Aesthetics Hermeneutics
Notable ideas	Practical philosophy[3] Historically-effected consciousness Fusion of horizons
Influences Aristotle Augustine Hegel Heidegger Husserl Jaspers Kant Plato Schelling Strauss
Influenced Babette Babich Wolfgang Drechsler Jürgen Habermas Dieter Henrich Hans Robert Jauss Reinhart Koselleck Dennis J. Schmidt Gianni Vattimo John McDowell Karl Jaspers Leo Strauss Ken Wilber

Life

Gadamer was born in Marburg, Germany,[4] the son of Johannes Gadamer (1867–1928),[5] a pharmaceutical chemistry professor who later also served as the rector of the University of Marburg. He was raised a Protestant Christian.[6] Gadamer resisted his father's urging to take up the natural sciences and 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 noted that this may have had an effect on his decision to not pursue scientific studies. Jean Grondin describes Gadamer as finding in his mother "a poetic and almost religious counterpart to the iron fist of his father".[7] Gadamer did not serve during World War I for reasons of ill health[8] and similarly was exempted from serving during World War II due to polio.[9]

He later studied classics and philosophy in the University of Breslau[10] under Richard Hönigswald, but soon moved back to the University of Marburg to study 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 (Das Wesen der Lust nach den Platonischen Dialogen) in 1922.[11]

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 became close to Heidegger, and when Heidegger received a position at Marburg, Gadamer followed him there, where he became one of a group of students such as Leo Strauss, Karl Löwith, and Hannah Arendt. It was Heidegger's influence that gave 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.[12]

Gadamer habilitated in 1929 and spent most of the early 1930s lecturing in Marburg. Unlike Heidegger, who joined the Nazi Party in May 1933 and continued as a member until the party was dissolved following World War II, Gadamer was silent on Nazism, and he was not politically active during the Third Reich. 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.[13]

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,[14] then in 1938 he received a professorship at Leipzig University.[15] From an SS-point of view Gadamer was classified as neither supportive nor disapproving in the "SD-Dossiers über Philosophie-Professoren" (i.e. SD-files concerning philosophy professors) that were set up by the SS-Security-Service (SD).[16] 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 works of Richard Wolin[17] and Teresa Orozco.[18] Orozco alleges, with reference 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"[19] while Donatella Di Cesare said that "the archival material on which Orozco bases her argument is actually quite negligible".[20] Cesare and Grondin have argued that there is no trace of antisemitism in Gadamer's work, and that Gadamer maintained friendships with Jews and provided shelter for nearly two years for the philosopher Jacob Klein in 1933 and 1934.[21] Gadamer also reduced his contact with Heidegger during the Nazi era.[22]

The communist DDR was no more to Gadamer's liking than the Third Reich, and he left for West Germany, accepting first 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.[23][24][25] He was also an Editorial Advisor of the journal Dionysius.[26] 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 order 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 first professorship in the University of Heidelberg.

In 1968, Gadamer invited 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.[27] Imamichi and Gadamer renewed contact four years later during an international congress.[27]

In 1981, Gadamer attempted to engage with Jacques Derrida at a conference in Paris but it proved less enlightening because the two thinkers had little in common. A last meeting between Gadamer and Derrida was held at the Stift of Heidelberg in July 2001, coordinated by Derrida's students Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly. This meeting marked, in many ways, a turn 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 arise between hermeneutics and deconstruction".[28]

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.[29]

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.[30] He is buried in the Köpfel cemetery in Ziegelhausen.[31]

Work

Philosophical hermeneutics and Truth and Method

Gadamer's philosophical project, as explained in Truth and Method, was to elaborate on the concept of "philosophical hermeneutics", which Heidegger initiated but never dealt with at length. Gadamer's goal was to uncover the nature of human understanding. In Truth and Method, Gadamer argued that "truth" and "method" were at odds with one another. For Gadamer, "the experience of art is exemplary in its provision of truths that are inaccessible by scientific methods, and this experience is projected to the whole domain of human sciences."[32] He was critical of two approaches to the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). On the one hand, he was critical of modern approaches to humanities that modeled themselves on the natural sciences, which simply sought to “objectively” observe and analyze texts and art. On the other hand, he took issue with the traditional German approaches to the humanities, represented for instance by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, who believed that meaning, as an object, could be found within a text through a particular process that allowed for a connection with the author's thoughts that led to the creation of a text (Schleiermacher),[33] or the situation that led to an expression of human inner life (Dilthey).[34]

However, Gadamer argued meaning and understanding are not objects to be found through certain methods, but are inevitable phenomena.[35] Hermeneutics is not a process in which an interpreter finds a particular meaning, but “a philosophical effort to account for understanding as an ontological—the ontological—process of man.”[35] Thus, Gadamer is not giving a prescriptive method on how to understand, but rather he is working to examine how understanding, whether of texts, artwork, or experience, is possible at all. Gadamer intended Truth and Method to be a description of what we always do when we interpret things (even if we do not know it): "My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing".[36]

As a result of Martin Heidegger’s temporal analysis of human existence, Gadamer argued that people have a so-called historically-effected consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein), and that they are embedded in the particular history and culture that shaped them. However the historical consciousness is not an object over and against our existence, but “a stream in which we move and participate, in every act of understanding.”[37] Therefore, people do not come to any given thing without some form of preunderstanding established by this historical stream. The tradition in which an interpreter stands establishes "prejudices" that affect how he or she will make interpretations. For Gadamer, these prejudices are not something that hinders our ability to make interpretations, but are both integral to the reality of being, and “are the basis of our being able to understand history at all.”[38] Gadamer criticized Enlightenment thinkers for harboring a "prejudice against prejudices".[39]

For Gadamer, interpreting a text involves a fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung). Both the text and the interpreter find themselves within a particular historical tradition, or “horizon.” Each horizon is expressed through the medium of language, and both text and interpreter belong to and participate in history and language. This “belongingness” to language is the common ground between interpreter and text that makes understanding possible. As an interpreter seeks to understand a text, a common horizon emerges. This fusion of horizons does not mean the interpreter now fully understands some kind of objective meaning, but is “an event in which a world opens itself to him.”[40] The result is a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

Gadamer further explains the hermeneutical experience as a dialogue. To justify this, he uses Plato's dialogues as a model for how we are to engage with written texts. To be in conversation, one must take seriously “the truth claim of the person with whom one is conversing.”[41] Further, each participant in the conversation relates to one another insofar as they belong to the common goal of understanding one another.[42] Ultimately, for Gadamer, the most important dynamic of conversation as a model for the interpretation of a text is “the give-and-take of question and answer.”[42] In other words, the interpretation of a given text will change depending on the questions the interpreter asks of the text. The "meaning" emerges not as an object that lies in the text or in the interpreter, but rather an event that results from the interaction of the two.

Truth and Method was published twice in English, and the revised edition is now considered authoritative. The German-language edition of Gadamer's Collected Works includes a volume in which Gadamer elaborates his argument and discusses the critical response to the book. Finally, Gadamer's essay on Celan (entitled "Who Am I and Who Are You?") has been considered by many—including Heidegger and Gadamer himself—as a "second volume" or continuation of the argument in Truth and Method.

Contributions to communication ethics

Gadamer's Truth and Method has become an authoritative work in the communication ethics field, spawning several prominent ethics theories and guidelines. The most profound of these is the formulation of the dialogic coordinates, a standard set of prerequisite communication elements necessary for inciting dialogue. Adhering to Gadamer's theories regarding bias, communicators can better initiate dialogic transaction, allowing biases to merge and promote mutual understanding and learning.[43]

Other works

Gadamer also added philosophical substance to the notion of human health. In The Enigma of Health, Gadamer explored what it means to heal, as a patient and a provider. In this work the practice and art of medicine are thoroughly examined, as is the inevitability of any cure.[44]

In addition to his work in hermeneutics, Gadamer is also well known for a long list of publications on Greek philosophy. Indeed, while Truth and Method became central to his later career, much of Gadamer's early life centered on studying Greek thinkers, Plato and Aristotle specifically. In the Italian introduction to Truth and Method, Gadamer said that his work on Greek philosophy was "the best and most original part" of his career.[45] His book Plato's Dialectical Ethics looks at the Philebus dialogue through the lens of phenomenology and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.[44]

Prizes and awards

1971: Pour le Mérite and the Reuchlin Prize

1972: Great Cross of Merit with Star of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

1979: Sigmund Freud Award for scientific prose and Hegel Prize

1986: Jaspers Prize

1990: Great Cross of Merit with Star and Sash of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

1993: Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

12 January 1996: appointed an honorary member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig

Honorary doctorates

1995: University of Wrocław

1996: University of Leipzig

1999: Philipps-University Marburg

Bibliography

Primary

• Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Trans. and ed. by P. Christopher Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980.
• The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age. Trans. John Gaiger and Richard Walker. Oxford: Polity Press, 1996.
• Gadamer on Celan: ‘Who Am I and Who Are You?’ and Other Essays. By Hans-Georg Gadamer. Trans. and ed. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997.
• The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings. Ed. by Richard E. Palmer. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007.
• Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies. Trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976.
• Heidegger's Ways. Trans. John W. Stanley. New York: SUNY Press, 1994.
• The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy. Trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven, CT: 1986.
• Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary Theory. Trans. Robert H. Paslick. New York: SUNY Press, 1993.
• Philosophical Apprenticeships. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985 (Gadamer's memoirs, translated by Robert R. Sullivan.)
• Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. and ed. by David Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
• Plato's "Parmenides" and Its Influence. Dionysius, Volume VII (1983): 3-16[46]
• Reason in the Age of Science. Trans. by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981.
• The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Trans. N. Walker. ed. R. Bernasconi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
• Praise of Theory. Trans. Chris Dawson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
• Truth and Method. 2nd rev. edition. Trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad, 2004. ISBN 978-0-8264-7697-5 excerpt

Secondary

• Arthos, John. The Inner Word in Gadamer's Hermeneutics. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.
• Cercel, Larisa (ed.), Übersetzung und Hermeneutik / Traduction et herméneutique, Bucharest, Zeta Books, 2009, ISBN 978-973-199-706-3.
• Davey, Nicholas. Unquiet Understanding: Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics. New York: SUNY Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0791468425.
• Davey, Nicholas. Unfinished Worlds. Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, and Gadamer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0748686223.
• Dostal, Robert L. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Drechsler, Wolfgang. Gadamer in Marburg. Marburg: Blaues Schloss, 2013.
• Code, Lorraine. ed. Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer. University Park: Penn State Press, 2003.
• Coltman, Robert. The Language of Hermeneutics: Gadamer and Heidegger in Dialogue. Albany: State University Press, 1998.
• Grondin, Jean. The Philosophy of Gadamer. trans. Kathryn Plant. New York: McGill-Queens University Press, 2002.
• Grondin, Jean. Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography trans. Joel

Weinsheimer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

• Kögler, Hans-Herbert. The Power of Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics after Gadamer and Foucault trans. Paul Hendrickson. MIT Press, 1996.
• Krajewski, Bruce (ed.), Gadamer's Repercussions: Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
• Lawn, Chris. Gadamer : a guide for the perplexed. (Guides for the perplexed) London: Continuum, c2006. ISBN 978-0-8264-8461-1
• Malpas, Jeff, and Santiago Zabala (eds),Consequences of Hermeneutics: Fifty Years after Truth and Method, (Northwestern University Press, 2010).
• Malpas, Jeff, Ulrich Arnswald and Jens Kertscher (eds.). Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honour of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.
• Risser, James. Hermeneutics and the Voice of the other: Re-reading Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.
• Sullivan, Robert R., Political Hermeneutics, The Early Thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Univ. Park, Penn State Press,1989.
• Warnke, Georgia. "Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason". Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.
• Weinsheimer, Joel. Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Reading of "Truth and Method". New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
• Wierciński, Andrzej. Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Art of Conversation Germany, Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011.
• Wright, Kathleen ed. Festivals of Interpretation: Essays on Hans-Georg Gadamer's Work. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990.
• P. Della Pelle, La dimensione ontologica dell'etica in Hans-Georg Gadamer, FrancoAngeli, Milano 2013.
• P. Della Pelle, La filosofia di Platone nell'interpretazione di Hans-Georg Gadamer, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 2014.

See also

• Gadamer–Derrida debate
• Limit situation

References

Citations

1. Jeff Malpas, Hans-Helmuth Gande (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, Routledge, 2014, p. 259.
2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Towards a phenomenology of ritual and language", in Lawrence Kennedy Schmidt (ed.), Language and Linguisticality in Gadamer's Hermeneutics, Lexington Books, 2000, p. 30; James Hans, "Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hermeneutic Phenomenology," Philosophy Today 22 (1978), 3–19.
3. "Hans-Georg Gadamer", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
4. Grondin 2003, p. 12.
5. Grondin 2003, pp. 26, 33.
6. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1986). The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (PDF). Cambridge University Press. p. 35. ISBN 9780521339537. Retrieved 16 January 2018. As a Protestant, I have always found especially significant the controversy over the Last Supper, which raged in the Protestant Church, particularly between Luther and Zwingli.
7. Grondin 2003, p. 21.
8. Grondin 2003, p. 45.
9. Grondin 2003, p. 46.
10. Grondin 2003, p. 37.
11. Cesare 2007, p. 5–7.
12. Cesare 2007, p. 7–8.
13. Ideologische Mächte im deutschen Faschismus Band 5: Heidegger im Kontext: Gesamtüberblick zum NS-Engagement der Universitätsphilosophen, George Leaman, Rainer Alisch, Thomas Laugstien, Verlag: Argument Hamburg, 1993, p. 105, ISBN 3886192059
14. Cesare 2007, p. 17.
15. Dostal, Robert (2002). The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer. Cambridge University Press. p. 20. ISBN 0521000416.
16. Leaman, Georg / Simon, Gerd: Deutsche Philosophen aus der Sicht des Sicherheitsdienstes des Reichsführers SS. Jahrbuch für Soziologie-Geschichte 1992, pages 261-292
17. Richard Wolin, ‚Nazism and the complicities of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Untruth and Method‘, The New Republic, 15 May 2000, pp. 36–45
18. Orozco 1995.
19. Grondin 2003, p. 165.
20. Cesare 2007, p. 30.
21. Grondin 2003, pp. 153–154.
22. Cesare 2007, pp. 14–15.
23. "Hans-Georg Gadamer Dies; Noted German Philosopher". Washington Post. March 16, 2002. Retrieved March 25, 2011.
24. Roberts, Julian (March 18, 2002). "Hans-Georg Gadamer". The Guardian. Retrieved March 25, 2011.
25. "Hans-Georg Gadamer". The Independent. March 26, 2002. Retrieved March 25, 2011.
26. "Department of Classics". Dalhousie University.
27. Imamichi, Tomonobu; Fagot-Largeault, Anne (2004). "In Search of Wisdom. One Philosopher's Journey" (PDF). Le Devenir Impensable. Tokyo, International House of Japan: Collège de France. Archived from the original (PDF) on 28 December 2010. Retrieved 7 December 2006.
28. Richard J. Bernstein (2002). "Hermeneutics, Critical Theory and Deconstruction". The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521801931.
29. Cesare 2007, p. 27.
30. Marucio, Fernando. "Hans-Georg Gadamer, 1900-2002". Geocities (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 18 October 2009. Retrieved 21 May 2018.
31. Cesare 2007, pp. 27–28.
32. Skorin-Kapov, Jadranka (2016), "The Intertwining of Aesthetics and Ethics: Exceeding of Expectations, Ecstasy, Sublimity," Lexington Books, ISBN 978-1498524568
33. Schleiermacher, Wojcik & Haas 1978, pp. 5, 10.
34. Palmer 1969, p. 98.
35. Palmer 1969, p. 163.
36. Truth and Method 2nd ed. Sheed and Ward, London 1989 XXVIII
37. Palmer 1969, p. 117.
38. Palmer 1969, p. 182.
39. Gonzales 2006, p. 328.
40. Palmer 1969, p. 209.
41. Gonzales 2006, pp. 322–323.
42. Gonzales 2006, p. 323.
43. Communication Ethics Literacy: Dialogue and Difference Arnett, Harden Fritz & Bell, Los Angeles 2009
44. Robert J. Dostal (2002). "Introduction". The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521801931.
45. Cesare 2007, p. 1.
46. "Department of Classics". Dalhousie University.

Works Cited

• Cesare, Donatella Di (2007). Gadamer: A Philosophical Portrait. Translated by Keane, Niall. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-25300-763-6.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Gonzales, Francisco J. (2006). "Dialectic and Dialogue in the Hermeneutics of Paul Ricouer and H.G. Gadamer". Continental Philosophy Review. 39 (1): 313–345. doi:10.1007/s11007-006-9031-4.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Grondin, Jean (2003). Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography. Translated by Weinsheimer, Joel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-30009-841-9.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Orozco, Teresa (1995). Platonische Gewalt: Gadamers politische Hermeneutik der NS-Zeit. Hamburg; Berlin: Argument Verlag. ISBN 978-3-88619-240-3.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Palmer, Richard (1969). Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 978-0-81010-459-4.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Schleiermacher, Friedrich D.E.; Wojcik, Jan; Haas, Roland (1978). "The Hermeneutics: Outline of the 1819 Lectures". New Literary History. 10 (1): 1–16. doi:10.2307/468302.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

External links

• Works by or about Hans-Georg Gadamer at Internet Archive
• Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jeff Malpas, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900—2002), Lauren Swayne Barthold, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Gadamer's Hermeneutics (introductory lecture by Henk de Berg, 2015)
• Chronology (in German)
• Works by Gadamer
• Hans-Georg Gadamer: Plato as portratist
• Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz: "On Hermeneutical Ethics and Education", a paper on the relevance of Gadamer's Hermeneutics for our understanding of music, ethics and education in both.