The title of this collection of essays contains a productive ambiguity that carries through the collection. The essays, by such notable thinkers as Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Pippen, Paul Ricoeur, Stanley Rosen, Charles Taylor, and Gianni Vattimo, address both Gadamer’s own life and work that spanned just over a century and the philosophical century which he inhabited, most notably, the century in which philosophy itself grappled with the end of metaphysics and the concomitant loss of the absolu…
Read moreThe title of this collection of essays contains a productive ambiguity that carries through the collection. The essays, by such notable thinkers as Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Pippen, Paul Ricoeur, Stanley Rosen, Charles Taylor, and Gianni Vattimo, address both Gadamer’s own life and work that spanned just over a century and the philosophical century which he inhabited, most notably, the century in which philosophy itself grappled with the end of metaphysics and the concomitant loss of the absolute universal. It is a collection that takes up from varying philosophical standpoints the ensuing linguistic turn as well as the problem of reason in both its practical and theoretical forms. Still further, it is a collection of essays which together argue that the hermeneutical standpoint articulated by Gadamer in Truth and Method may be philosophy’s best methodological hope. What makes this collection of essays both unique and invaluable is its attempt to perform a Gadamerian “fusion of horizons”; it not only brings philosophy together with other disciplines such as religion, art, and poetry, it also brings together Continental and analytic responses to Gadamer’s hermeneutical project and to the issues confronting philosophy in Gadamer’s century, a century that paradoxically remains ours.