Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2000 14:11:49 -0400
From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." <bradmcc-AT-cloud9.net>
Subject: Re: (My findings) Hans-Georg Gadamer


Arun-Kumar Tripathi wrote:
> 
> Greetings All,
> 
> Some thoughts on the great eminent scholar -Hans Georg Gadamer- He
> graduated in 1922 with a thesis on "The essence of pleasure and dialogue
> in Plato". He is one of leading authorities on contemporary philosophy.

Essence, pleasure, dialogue -- I have not read Gadamer's dissertation,
but the simple juxtaposition of these three words is enough for me
to start off on, or preferably, to continue, the pleasure of dialog
on what is essential, which seems to me to be, in the first place,
dialog itself, i.e., dialogical reflection on dialogue in -- to use
a phrase of Gadamer's: -- "the conversation we are"....

> 
> In his book,  "The Beginning of Philosophy" --he wrote, "The crucial thing
> in my lectures on the Presocratics is that I begin
[snip]
> with Plato and Aristotle. This, in my
> judgement, is the sole philosophical access to an interpretation of the
> Presocratics. Everything else is historicism without philosophy."
[snip]

Such an approach, starting with "the things themselves", instead of
the unreflected reifications into which we have been childreared and
schooled and peer pressured, etc. seems to me to be the right way to
go.  For isn't everything the interpretation of where we are, even
though we can and for the most part often do, think we are doing
something else in that fantasy world -- aka "reality" -- of the
unreflected reifications? 

The architect Louis Kahn said: "[A]ll material in nature,
the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made
of Light which has been spent, and this crumpled mass called
material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light."
(_Between Silence and Light_, 1979, p. 22).  And, of course,
Kahn, just like Wittgenstein, and others, was not referring
to physical light ("photons", etc.), but to that light of
the mind which is the light of the world (conversation,
again, I would urge...)....

> 
> BTW, the eminent scholar, Prof. Hans-Georg Gadamer --who is now 100 years
> old, is still busy and working at Heidelberg University, Germany..

For some reason, I thought Gadamer had died a couple years ago.
Thank you for informing me (us?) that he is still alive and working.
How much our so-called post-modern (or is it now post-post-modern?)
age, which in my opinion has not yet been really modern, needs
such humane thinkers!  

> 
> Sincerely yours
> Arun Tripathi

"Yours in discourse...."

+\brad mccormick

-- 
   Let your light so shine before men, 
               that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)

   Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)

Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc-AT-cloud9.net
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
-------------------------------------------------------
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