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Hans-Georg Gadamer

11 February 1900-13 March 2002

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The Anticipation of meaning is the tension in reading a text whereby one is at the same time focusing on the word or sentence level as well as at the complete meaning of the text as a whole, a meaning which, in the case of aesthetic objects, often disrupts our anticipations.

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Bildung is a life task that belongs to everyone, and it occurs both inside and outside educational institutions. It is more the nature of a process and project that aims at the transformation of the self, and not in any single direction.

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Deconstruction is not about awakening hidden meaning. It is the background network of meaning-relations lying at the basis of all speech. It shatters metaphysics by dissolving the very integrity of sense.

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The Fusion of horizons is the idea that communication at a distance between two differently situated consciousnesses occurs by means of the fusion of their horizons which indicates it is the intersection of their views.

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Hermeneutics is a lens through which the other is no longer an object for the subject but becomes someone to whom we are bound in the reciprocations of language and life.

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Hermeneutics is not a doctrine of methods but rather a basic insight into what thinking and knowing mean for human beings in their practical life, even if one makes use of scientific methods.

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Hermeneutics is not about locating or fixing truth... rather it is about the ongoing process of understanding the conditions necessary for understanding to occur.

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Hermeneutics is not prescriptive, it is meant to describe how we already live and think. It is an analysis and description of the inherent structure of understanding itself.

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Hermeneutics is something far more basic than a method. It is, in fact, sharply critical of the far-reaching claims made in the name of the method.

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Hermeneutics is an approach that encourages not objectification but listening to one another for example, the listening to and belonging with (zuhoren) someone who knows how to tell a story.

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Hermeneutics is grounded in the idea that understanding is not a method but rather a form of community among those who understand each other.

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Hermeneutics is tasked not to develop rules for what understanding is, but rather to serve as an instrument that we may use to clarify the basis of our understanding.

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Hermeneutics is the art of clarifying and mediating by our own effort of interpretation what is said by persons we encounter in tradition.