World of Philosophy

SR No.: 007005
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan
Publication Year: 2011
Total Pages: 1002
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 30 MB

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for hermeneutics that Heidegger advanced in the 1920s and that Gadamer made into a central idea in his own thinking. Hermeneutics concerns our fundamental mode of being in the world and understanding is thus the basic phenomenon in our existence. We cannot go back 'behind understanding, since to do so would be to suppose that there was a mode of intelligibility that was prior to understanding. Hermeneutics thus turns out to be universal, not merely in regard to knowledge, whether in the 'human sciences' or elsewhere, but to all understanding and, indeed, to philosophy itself. Philosophy is, in its essence, hermeneutics. Gadamer's claim for the universality of hermeneutics was one of the explicit points at issue in the debate between Gadamer and Habermas; it can also be seen as, in a certain sense, underlying the engagement between Gadamer and Derrida, although in Derrida's case this consisted in a denial of the primacy of understanding, and the possibility of agreement, on which hermeneutics itself rests.
very finite': et, he dould be for
It would seem the only way out of these paradoxes would be for Gadamer to argue that horizons aren't limits after all. Yet, he does seem to say quite clearly that horizons are limits. "Every finite present has its limitations. We define the concept of "situation" by saying that it represents a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence essential to the concept of a situation is the concept of a "horizon." The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular standpoint."
The two horizons, the inner horizon of the subject matter of the culture and the outer horizon of the historical context of the same, are not unrelated. When Descartes says that the body is like a machine, we need to not only know what kind of thing a body is, and what kind of thing a machine is, but what kind of thing they would have thought a body and machine were in the seventeenth century in order to see what this sentence means. If we find that in Descartes' context, calling something a machine was a sign of praise for its complexity and craftsmanship, then we get an idea of what the claim "human bodies are machines" means, which would be very different from the one we'd get if we knew that calling something a machine in Descartes' context meant it was sure to break at some point. Also if we find that in the seventeenth century "body" referred to all physical objects, then again we have a quite different understanding from the one we'd get if "body" referred only to animal or human matter. So the outer horizons itself inform us of the appropriate inner horizons, of the possible subject matter of the sentence. When dealing with texts, the outer horizon is what Gadamer refers to as the historical horizon. The candidates for the meaning of a sentence are given by the historical context.
The inner horizon informs us of the outer horizon as well. All the examples above are plausible ways to think of the body (as something that's complicated, as something that breaks, as being fundamentally related to all
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