Consequences of Hermeneutics: Fifty Years After Gadamer’s Truth and Method

The publication of Hans-Georg Gadamer's magnum opus Truth and Method in 1960 marked the arrival of philosophical hermeneutics as a dominant force in philosophy and the humanities as a whole. Consequences of Hermeneutics celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century with essays by most of the leading figures in contemporary hermeneutic theory, including Gianni Vattimo and Jean Grondin.

These essays examine the achievements of hermeneutics as well as its current status and prospects for the future. Gadamer's text provides an important focus, but the ambition of these critical reappraisals extends to hermeneutics more broadly and to a range of other thinkers, such as Heidegger, Ricoeur, Derrida, and Rorty. Forcefully demonstrating the continuing relevance and power of hermeneutics, Consequences of Hermeneutics is a fitting tribute to Gadamer and the legacy of his thought.

Jeff Malpas is a professor of philosophy at the University of Tasmania and is the author of Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning (1992), Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (1999), and Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (2006).

Santiago Zabala is a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Remains of Being (2009) and The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy (2004) and editor of Weakening Philosophy (2007) and Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo’s The Future of Religion (2005). His forthcoming book, coauthored with Gianni Vattimo, is Hermeneutic Communism.