Hans-Georg Gadamer: Phronetic Understanding and Learned Ignorance

Abstract

Hans-Georg Gadamer was born in Marburg on February 11, 1900, and spent his childhood in Breslau in Silesia (now Wroclaw, Poland). As he wryly remarks in Philosophical Apprenticeships, his father was a fervent natural scientist who disdained the humanities, and was appalled by his son’s native inclinations to “chatty” disciplines such as philosophy, art, and literature. Much later the mature Gadamer retorted with an elaborate defense of the legitimacy and autonomy of the human sciences vis-à-vis the natural sciences. After graduating from the Holy Spirit Gymnasium of Breslau in 1918, he enrolled in Breslau University to study the humanities. In 1919 he moved to Marburg, where he came under the influence of Paul Natorp, Nicolai Hartmann, life philosophy, and the Stefan George circle. He completed his doctorate in 1922 with a dissertation on Plato written under Natorp. In 1923 he spent three months at Freiburg where he attended the lectures of Husserl and Heidegger, and those of Heidegger in particular impressed him enormously. The influence of Heidegger on Gadamer intensified after Heidegger’s move to Marburg in 1925. Gadamer was enthralled by Heidegger’s radical interpretations of Greek philosophy, and this motivated him to undertake a new systematic study of classical philology and ancient rhetoric, especially under Paul Friedländer. Gadamer passed a state examination in classical philology in 1927, and completed his habilitation in philosophy in 1928 with Platos dialektische Ethik, a phenomenological interpretation of the Philebus heavily influenced by Heidegger.