Philosophical hermeneutics hans-georg gadamer biography
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Hans-Georg Gadamer
1. Biographical Sketch
Born on February 11, 1900, in Marburg, in Southern Germany, Gadamer grew up in Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland), where his father was Professor of Pharmacy at the University of Breslau, later taking the Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at Marburg. Gadamer’s family background was Protestant, and his father was sternly Prussian. His mother died of diabetes when Gadamer was only four, and he had no surviving brothers or sisters. Showing an early interest in humanistic studies, Gadamer began university studies in Breslau in 1918 (studying with Richard Hoenigswald), moving to Marburg with his father in 1919. Gadamer completed his doctoral studies at Marburg in 1922 (in his own words, ‘too young’—see Gadamer 1997b, 7) with a dissertation on Plato. In that same year, Gadamer also contracted poliomyelitis, from which he recovered only slowly, and the after-effects of which remained with him for the rest of his life.
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Hans-Georg Gadamer
German philosopher (1900–2002)
Hans-Georg Gadamer (; German:[ˈɡaːdamɐ]; 11 February 1900 – 13 March 2002) was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus on hermeneutics, Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode).
Life
[edit]Family and early life
[edit]Gadamer was born in Marburg, Germany, the son of Johannes Gadamer (1867–1928), a pharmaceutical chemistry professor who later also served as the rector of the University of Marburg. He was raised a Protestant Christian.[6] Gadamer resisted his father's urging to take up the natural sciences and became more and more interested in the humanities. His mother, Emma Karoline Johanna Geiese (1869–1904) died of diabetes while Hans-Georg was four years old, and he later noted that this may have had an effect on his decision not to pursue scientific studies. Jean Grondin describes Gadamer as finding in his mother "a poetic and almost religiou
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Philosophical Hermeneutics
Hans-Georg Gadamer is the father of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics. He was born and educated in Marburg, Germany, where he studied under Martin Heidegger. Shortly after World War II, he was appointed professor of philosophy at Heidelberg University, a position that he held for almost 20 years, until he retired in 1968. His work seeks a recovery of the Greek sense of a comprehensive and coherent worldview, which he believes has been lost in the fragmentation of modern industrial culture. Gadamer has written major studies of Plato, Aristotle, and Georg Hegel. He is known for opposing science as it is developed and valued in Enlightenment thought. Gadamer's major contribution has been his work in hermeneutics, an approach that seeks to liberate the humanistic interpretation of experience from the strictures of science and technology, challenging the doctrine that truth is correspondence between an external fact and an idea in the mind of a sub