The Event of Meaning in Gadamers Hermeneutics [Hardcover]

This book presents the first detailed treatment of Gadamers account of the nature of meaning. It argues both that this account is philosophically valuable in its own right and that understanding it sheds new light on his wider hermeneutical project.

By using the lens of the event of meaning, DaVia and Lynch revive the legacy of Gadamers hermeneutics and show Gadamer in a new light, opening up new encounters with his work from both continental and analytic philosophical approaches to language, meaning, and interpretation.

Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Radboud University, The Netherlands

Introduction? 1. Occasionality? 2. Ideality? 3. Interpreting Correctly? 4. Originalism and the Fusion of Horizons? 5. Aspects of Being? 6. Essences? 7. The Task of Philosophy

This book presents the first detailed treatment of Gadamers account of the nature of meaning. It argues both that this account is philosophically valuable in its own right and that understanding it sheds new light on his wider hermeneutical project.

Whereas philosophers have typically thought of meanings as belonging to a special class of objects, the central claim of Gadamers view is that meanings are events. Instead of a pre-existing content that we must unearth through our interpretive efforts, for Gadamer the meaning of a text is what happens when we encounter it in the appropriate way. In events of meaning the world makes itself intelligibly present to us in a manner that is uniquely and irreducibly bound up with the concrete situation in which we find ourselves. When we recognize that Gadamer thinks of meaning in this way, we are better positioned to appreciate what his wider views amount to and how they hang together. Gadamers accounts of interpretive normativity, the aspectival character of understanding, and the nature of essences, for example, snap into more vivid lóh