Gadamer’s hermeneutics civilized Heidegger’s philosophy for Habermas

Evidence

Gadamer regarded himself both as a student of Heidegger’s and as a trained classical philologist, and he was concerned in his principal work, Truth and Method (1960), with relativizing the sciences in terms of the sphere of experience of philosophy and art. What appealed to Habermas in Gadamer was that he was a philosophical practitioner of hermeneutics, who had, as it were, urbanized the Heideggerian province. He was a philosopher of the humanities who had unintentionally contributed to a transformed, more liberal conception of modern science. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2502

Categorization

• DEFINE: Characterizes Gadamer’s project of Truth and Method.
• XREF: Recalls the Habermas-Gadamer debate and the liberalization of hermeneutics within Critical Theory. — connects to: Heidegger’s philosophy was debated within the Frankfurt Circle debating group — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 386; Habermas’s theory of human species formation synthesized a wide range of philosophical sources — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2427; Postwar German re-education shaped Habermas’s political disillusionment — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2292

Broader Connections

• Postwar German re-education shaped Habermas’s political disillusionment #expands (0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2292