A revised translation of Heidegger's most important work.

Perhaps no other aspect of Hans-Georg Gadamer'sWahrheit und Methodehas generated more controversy and caustic criticism than his attempt to defend the role of ‘prejudice’ (Vorurteil) in human understanding. Gadamer's goal in challenging what he calls ‘the Enlightenment's prejudice against prejudice’ is not to defend irresponsible, idiosyncratic, parochial or otherwise self-willed understanding in the human sciences, but to argue that all human cognition is ‘finite’ and ‘limited’ in the sense that it always involves, to borrow Polanyi's phrase, a ‘tacit dimension’ of (...) implicit judgments, concerns, or commitments which shape definitively our grasp of the subject matter in ways we cannot anticipate or control. This implies a ‘finite’ or ‘limited’ view of human understanding in at least two ways. First, Gadamer seems to use the word ‘finite’ in conscious opposition to Hegel's notion of an ‘infinite’ intellect. For Hegel the ‘infinite’ was the ‘unconditioned’ and ‘self-determining’. An ‘infinite’ intellect would be its own master, an autonomous, spontaneous source of all its essential activities and contents. (shrink)

Richard Rorty challenges the traditional use of hermeneutic understanding to defend the methodological autonomy of the social sciences, claiming that hermeneutics is part of both social and natural science and, moreover, that it exposes the limits of ?epistemologically centered philosophy?. Hermeneutics is interested in edification rather than truth, in finding new ways of speaking rather than adjudicating knowledge claims or securing the grounds of rational consensus. Although Rorty refers to Gadamer's ?philosophical hermeneutics? as support for this position, Gadamer's own analysis (...) points in a different direction. First, it distinguishes the social from the natural sciences as forms of practical, not theoretical, knowledge. As hermeneutic analyses, the social sciences participate in an on?going dialogue about values and forms of life. Second, the goal of this dialogue is cognitive and normative agreement. Indeed, hermeneutics is an act of integration which tries to expand consensus between different cultures and historical perspectives by mediating their claims to truth. (shrink)