Hans-Georg Gadamer

Gadamer was born in Marburg to a chemistry professor who despised the humanities; he studied classics and philosophy at Breslau and Marburg all the same. He took his doctorate under Natorp in 1922 with a thesis on Plato, contracted polio the same year and read Heidegger's manuscripts from his sickbed. In 1923 he went to Freiburg to study with Heidegger, became his assistant when Heidegger moved to Marburg, and qualified to teach in 1929 with Plato's Dialectical Ethics. Heidegger told him: if you cannot surpass me in scholarship, become a philologist.

Under the Nazis he neither joined the party nor resisted, taught as an unsalaried professor at Marburg, took a chair at Leipzig in 1939, was appointed rector of Leipzig by the Soviet authorities after the war, moved to Frankfurt in 1947 and in 1949 succeeded Jaspers at Heidelberg, where he taught until retirement in 1968 and went on lecturing for thirty years more. He taught and wrote in the manner of dialogue, seldom at length, and published his major work only at sixty.

Truth and Method appeared in 1960. Its question: what kind of truth do the human sciences have? The answer: not one that comes from method, but from the event of understanding. A work of art draws its viewer in as a game draws in its players; one always understands a text with one's own prejudices, which are not obstacles but the conditions from which understanding begins, and the Enlightenment's 'prejudice against prejudice' is itself a prejudice; understanding happens when the interpreter's horizon fuses with the text's; temporal distance is not a gulf to be crossed but the medium in which meaning shows itself; understanding is always application, as a judge applies the law to a case; its model is dialogue, the logic of question and answer; and all understanding takes place in language, for 'being that can be understood is language'.

The book provoked two famous debates: Habermas argued that hermeneutics ignored the distortion of tradition by ideology and needed the supplement of critical theory; Derrida, meeting him in Paris in 1981, questioned whether the 'good will' to understand was itself metaphysical. In old age he wrote on poetics, medicine and Plato and conversed across the world, keeping friendships with Habermas, Derrida, Rorty and Ricoeur. He lived to a hundred and two, the gentlest and most dialogical of Heidegger's heirs.