Jean Grondin

Looking Back with Gadamer Over his Writings and their Effective History A Dialogue with Jean Grondin (1996)

In this interview with Jean Grondin, Gadamer discusses the meaning ‘linguisticality’ and acknowledges his intellectual debt to Heidegger, Augustine, Vico and classical Greek philosophy. Heidegger’s influence on Gadamer can be seen in Gadamer’s awareness of pernicious ontological effects of the Latinization of European language, his awareness of the centrality of technology to the understanding of contemporary philosophical problems and the idea that ‘language speaks’. From Augustine, Gadamer derived his theory of the word as that which cannot be known and brought under control; from Vico the idea that language is rhetorical; and from classical philosophy the Aristotelian idea of phronesis and the Platonic idea that the idea of beauty is inseparable from the idea of the good. Gadamer concludes the interview with a discussion of the need for humanity to overcome its present fascination with technology.

Reification from Lukács to Habermas

Is Georg Lukacs one of the classical authors of the philosophical tradition? This question might appear somewhat odd in a collection of articles commemorating his centenary. It is just that, although the work of Lukacs represents nothing less than a monument to all those who are interested in Marxism, as exemplified by a prodigious body of literature, it remains largely ignored in more traditional philosophy, which is often little disposed to consider even Marx himself as a genuine philosopher. Hermeneutics and analytic philosophy, two dominant currents at the present time, hardly ever concern themselves with the one who, since Merleau-Ponty, has been called the founding father of Western Marxism.2

In Any Event? Critical Remarks on the Recent Fascination with the Notion of Event

When one is speaking with overwhelming emphasis about the importance of the notion of “event” in philosophy or culture, it would be helpful to know what one is even talking about, since events come in many shapes and forms. In a trivial sense, every occurrence is an event. This book is an event, but so is this word, say, the word “word” as it is used in this sentence. This micro-event entails, in turn, a host of other events: every letter and syllable of the word “word” can be viewed as an event, as can its phonetic pronunciation and the events it implies, what goes on in our mind when we utter or understand it, the font used to print it, the story of those fonts and of writing itself, which has something to do with the history of human civilization, which is an event in itself. There are events that strike our imagination, and others we hardly notice or can not notice at all, such as all the chemical processes going on in our bodies or in those of an ant, a cell, or a subatomic particle. To use a classical terminology, the notion of event is as wide in extension as it is narrow in intention.

Kontext und Wirkung

Fur Heideggers Werk ist eine fast durchgangige Distanzierung von der philosophischen Anthropologie charakteristisch, die in zwei von einem anthropologischen Zwischenspiel unterbrochene Phasen zerfallt. In der Fruhzeit ist das Motiv der Protest gegen die Absorption der Selbstbesinnung durch Einordnung in uberpersonliche Kultursysteme. Seit Mitte der 1930er Jahre steht Anthropologie dann fur eine die philosophische Disziplin dieses Namens weit uberschreitende metaphysische Tendenz des Menschen zur Weltbemachtigung.