Inheriting Gadamer: New Directions in Philosophical Hermeneutics - Hardcover

Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics - one of the seminal philosophies of the 20th century - has had a profound influence on a wide array of fields, including classical philology, theology, the philosophy of the social sciences, literary theory, philosophy of law, critical social theory and the philosophy of art. This collection expands on some of these areas and takes his hermeneutics into yet new fields including narrative medicine, biotechnology, the politics of memory, the philosophy of place and the non-verbal language of the body. And, building on Gadamer's well-known discussions with Heidegger, Habermas and Derrida, Inheriting Gadamer sets him in dialogue with Mahatma Gandhi, Christine Korsgaard, Charles Mills and others. In these ways, the volume holds fast to a Gadamerian virtue: cultivating our important philosophical traditions while embracing the constant need to re-think their meaning in new circumstances and in relation to new knowledge.

Georgia Warnke is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. She is also Director of the Center for Ideas and Society. She is the author of Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason (Polity, 1987), Justice and Interpretation (MIT Press, 1993), Legitimate Differences: Interpretation in the Abortion Controversy and Other Public Debates (University of California Press, 1999), After Identity: Rethinking Race, Sex and Gender (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Debating Sex and Gender (Oxford University Press, 2010).