Hans-Georg Gadamer: between ontology and philosophical hermeneutics

Abstract

This article exposes some problems addressed by Hans-Georg Gadamer on the universality of his philosophical hermeneutics as an introduction to it. In the first part, the historical background of the so-called "linguistic turn of the 20th century" is reviewed; then, in the second part, his culminating work Truth and Method (1960) is analyzed. The help of some secondary authors such as Jean Grondin is very useful as a prologue to the hermeneutical thought of the German philosopher, and highlights his disagreements with the analytical/Anglo-Saxon side, which allows us to understand the particularities of the Gadamerian proposal.