Verità e metodo – cinquant’anni dopo.

La filosofia contemporanea fra il comprendere e l’altro

Abstract

One of the key contributions of Hans–Georg Gadamer to contemporary philosophy is the centrality that the notion of understanding has acquired, thanks to his thought, within the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics. At the same time, in the history of the reception of Gadamer’s work, this centrality has become the nucleus of major misunderstandings about the relations between understanding and interpretation, scientific knowledge, and otherness. Otherness is the main issue that separates Gadamer’s thought from phenomenology, contemporary French philosophy, and the Frankfurt School. The role played by the “other” in Gadamer’s philosophy endures the many critiques that it has received: as the point of balance between understanding and misunderstanding, the other is never the object of misappropriation, of an acritical (and violent) inclusion within the self; on the contrary, the other stands at the centre of a complex work of listening and dialoguing, which represents the very nature of hermeneutics.