Hermeneutics

Hans-Georg Gadamer

1900 – 2002

The fusion of horizons refuses the neutral observer: you understand a situation by entering it and letting it revise you.

Read alongside: Sense

Start with
Truth and Method (1960)
Where they resist the book
If every reading is prejudiced by tradition, the claim to read a terrain accurately becomes a claim about company, not perception.

Works worth the time

Truth and Method · 1960

Understanding as a fusion of horizons — why a conversation changes both parties or neither.

Read further

Where Gadamer appears

III. SensePhilosophy

Understanding is participation, not extraction.

Gadamer's fusion of horizons refuses the idea of a neutral observer: you understand a situation by entering it and letting it revise you. Polanyi's tacit knowing accounts for what a practitioner sees but cannot yet articulate — the knowledge that arrives as unease before it arrives as words.