GADAMER'S HERMENEUTICAL ONTOLOGY

Abstract

This paper aims to show that Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics can be understood only with respect to that place where it shows itself as a hermeneutical philosophy. Only if it is considered as a hermeneutical ontology, experiences of art and history show themselves as forms of hermeneutical experience. Otherwise, Gadamer's thought is reduced to a theory that insists on the finite character of understanding as something that precludes knowledge of things themselves, and not as the condition of possibility of knowledge, the way things themselves are. By this the speculative structure of language i.e. self-representational character of being on which Gadamer insists is ignored.