David Weberman

This paper re-examines the central thesis of Gadamer’s hermeneutics that objectivity is not a suitable ideal for understanding a text, historical event, or cultural phenomenon because there exists no one correct interpretation of such phenomena. Because Gadamer fails to make clear the grounds for this claim, this paper considers three possible arguments. The first, predominant in the literature on Gadamer, is built on the premise that we cannot surpass our historically situated prejudgments. The paper rejects this argument as insufficient. Similarly, the paper rejects a second argument concerning the heuristics of understanding. The paper then articulates a third argument that the object of understanding changes according to the conditions in which it is grasped. The paper appeals to the notion of relational properties to make sense of this claim and to defend the position against two objections: i) that it conflates meaning and significance, and ii) that it is saddled with an indefensible relativism.

Diese Studie will zeigen, daß die Antwort auf das Problem des historischen Erkennens nicht in der Alternative zwischen Objektivismus und Subjektivismus zu suchen ist. Im Mittelpunkt der Analyse stehen drei zeitgenössische Philosophen, Gadamer, Habermas und Danto, die das objektivistische Modell für inadäquat halten. Dies führt zu einer weiterentwickelten Konzeption der Zukunftsorientiertheit des historischen Erkennens und strebt einer Widerlegung aller Arten des Objektivismus an, auch derjenigen in subjektivistischer Verkleidung, ohne in den Subjektivismus zurückzufallen.

Peter Geach and others suppose that change in an object's relational properties absent any change in its intrinsic properties is not a genuine change in that object but only a “mere Cambridge change.” I explain and reject two strategies challenging Geach's position. I then present my own argument against Geach which depends on the recognition of entities identified in terms of their emergent properties, i.e. properties not reducible to physical properties. I provide some examples of such entities and address the problem of finding a criterion for distinguishing genuine from nonge‐nuine change

Wittgensteinian readings of Being and Time, and of the source of the intelligibility of Dasein''s world, in terms of language and the average everyday public practices of das Man are partly right and partly wrong. They are right in correcting overly individualist and existentialist readings of Heidegger. But they are wrong in making Heidegger into a proponent of language or everydayness as the final word on intelligibility and the way the world is disclosed to us. The everydayness of das Man and language are partial sources of intelligibility but only insofar as they are comprehended within the greater unitary structure of care and temporality. Care and temporality constitute the foundational underpinnings for disclosure and the intelligibility ofthat wherein Dasein dwells.