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This is a careful, a subtle, and a strong piece of work. It is one of the infre-quent books about Heidegger’s thought that neither just repeats (or mimics)Heidegger’s work, nor distorts that work for purposes of polemic or politicalaccommodation. The way in which it brings up questions about debts, abouthistory, and about origin (following on Zarader’s earlier book, Heidegger etles Paroles de l’origine [Vrin, 1986]) definitely warrants much philosophicalattention.

David Lachterman was to review this book originally.He had found that it had something significant to say.He had not written the review when death cut short hishighly respected philosophical career. While I wouldnot presume to claim to understand the substance of thebook as he did, I do agree that the book has somethingsignificant to say.

Wayne J. FromanGeorge Mason University

Brice R. Wachterhauser, ed. Hermeneutics and Truth (Evanston, Illinois:Northwestern University Press 1994) 255 pp. $44.95 (cloth), $18.95 (paper).

Recognizing the pervasiveness of interpretation in human experience, as BriceWachterhauser argues in his introduction to Hermeneutics and Truth, doesnothing to offset philosophy’s traditional self-understanding as an inquiry intothe truth about its various objects of investigation. Philosophers who rejectfoundationalist epistemology and who, following such figures as Martin Hei-degger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, are inclined to emphasize the historicity ofhuman existence and the situated character of inquiry are not thereby relievedof the responsibility of addressing questions of truth. How truth would best beunderstood, which criteria if any are best suited to its disclosure, and relatedquestions are not resolved by pointing out, as a variety of hermeneutical andpostmodern thinkers frequently do, that truth may no longer be understood asan aperspectival and presuppositionless mirroring of objective reality. Suchquestions are neither resolved nor dissolved simply by taking issue withcorrespondence theory or with foundationalist premises in general. What isrequired, the editor of this volume proposes, is that questions of truth beposed anew by philosophers who have taken the hermeneutical or linguistic

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turn while preserving a commitment to one or another conception of truth.What truth means in the aftermath of foundationalist epistemology, and inparticular which conception of truth may be thought consistent with the prin-ciples of philosophical hermeneutics, is the main focus of this collection ofarticles.

The volume includes two of Gadamer’s early essays, “Truth in the HumanSciences” (1954) and “What is Truth?” (1957), both of which predate Truthand Method and which have not previously appeared in English. Severalthemes that Gadamer later developed in his magnum opus and subsequentpapers make an appearance here, including the importance of tradition andauthority in interpretation, the problem of relativism, and the relation betweenthe human and natural sciences, although it is questions of truth that come tothe fore. Gadamer’s view that recognizing the situated and contextual natureof inquiry in the human sciences does nothing to undermine its truth value isa primary focus of “Truth in the Human Sciences.” Here Gadamer argues thatboth the subject matter of the human sciences and the truth about the subjectmatter are historically conditioned. This gives rise to the need for interpre-tation to become and remain mindful of its own historicity and finitude, forit is in being so mindful, rather than in making false appeals to supposedlyahistorical touchstones of knowledge, that we are best able to guard againstthe manipulation of truth claims by power interests. Although conversationis never immune from the possibility of manipulation and corruption, it iswithin such conversation rather than through adherence to the methods ofthe natural sciences that truth is uncovered within the human sciences. Thetheme of hermeneutic dialogue is also front and center in “What is Truth?”Here Gadamer confronts such issues as whether the truth of statements isdetermined solely on the basis of their propositional content and whetherthere exist decontextualized truths. Answering both questions in the negative,Gadamer argues that the truth of statements is invariably assessed within acontext of largely tacit presuppositions. The truth that speech makes manifestis never completely disengaged either from the context in which speech occursor from the horizon of finite interpreters. Moreover, it is not the propositionbut the question and the context within which the question is articulated thatis most fundamental to the disclosure of truth. While readers familiar withTruth and Method and more recent writings will find little if anything that isgenuinely new in these papers, they do find Gadamer addressing questions oftruth in a somewhat more direct and concise manner than he does in most ofthe later works.

The articles that follow these two papers – from such contributors as ErnstTugendhat, Rudiger Bubner, Georgia Warnke, Jean Grondin, David Carpen-ter, and Robert J. Dostal – focus upon questions of truth in both Heidegger’s

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and Gadamer’s thought, although it is the latter that represents the principalfocus of the volume. A case in point is Robert Dostal’s “The Experienceof Truth for Gadamer and Heidegger: Taking Time and Sudden Lightning.”This essay points out an important area of contrast between the Heideggerianand Gadamerian accounts of the experience of truth. While, as Dostal pointsout, Gadamer appropriates from Heidegger a conception of truth as aletheia,or as an event of disclosure, he argues that the manner in which Gadamerappropriates this notion from Heidegger is not without significant alteration.The principal difference between the two, as Dostal expresses it, “concernsthe immediacy of the experience of truth for Heidegger and the mediatedcharacter of the experience for Gadamer. The truth overcomes us suddenly,in a moment, like a flash of lightning on Heidegger’s account. For Gadamer,the exemplary experience of truth comes when we take the time to dwell onthe matter at hand in conversation with another” (p. 49). Without exaggerat-ing the extent of the dissimilarity between these two fundamentally similaraccounts, Dostal provides a strong case for viewing the two as diverging onthe matter of the relative immediacy of “the truth-event.” In both Being andTime and Heidegger’s later works, truth is understood primarily on the modelof religious revelation, as a flash of lightning or a sudden hearkening of theword. It is the lightning metaphor above all that captures Heidegger’s viewof the experience of truth, while for Gadamer the experience is best capturedwithin the model of conversation. For the latter, truth is described as occurringwithin the dialogical process of question and answer, assertion and reply. ForGadamer it is in the unhurried explication of the subject matter and in gettinglost in the conversation that truth “happens,” rather than in any kind of suddenor quasi-religious revelation.

Gadamer’s ruminations upon the truth-event remain the focus in David Car-penter’s “Emanation, Incarnation, and the Truth-Event in Gadamer’s Truthand Method.” This interesting essay draws attention to Gadamer’s ontology ofthe truth-event and traces its roots within the Platonic and Christian traditions,concentrating specifically upon the Neoplatonic metaphor of emanation andthe Christian notion of the Incarnation. Truth and Method, Carpenter argues,holds to a view of truth as an event of self-presentation. Being itself is under-stood by Gadamer as fundamentally self-presentative, a fact that constitutes“the ontological foundation for the experience of truth, which encounters usas an event” (p. 120). The event – the happening – of truth is understoodby Gadamer not only as an affair of language but as the self-presentation orself-expression of being. As an event, it is importantly similar to the Neo-platonic concept of emanation, the “self-diffusiveness” of the form of theGood, as well as to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation (“the word madeflesh”) in that in each instance what is made manifest not only suffers no

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diminution of its being, but gains an intelligibility and meaning that it previ-ously lacked. It is these ancient doctrines that help elucidate what Gadamerunderstands by the speculative or mirror-like character of both language andbeing. According to Gadamer, being comes to expression and becomes itselfonly in language. Rather than conceiving of word and object as standing inany kind of opposition, or of the word as a mere representation (hence adiminution) of the object, he conceives of word and object as being mutuallyconstituted in the sense that it is in being expressed in language that the objectcomes to presentation and becomes what it is. Gadamer speaks not only oflanguage but of being itself as having a speculative structure; being “makesitself available for our understanding and therefore we understand” (p. 98).The happening of truth, like the emanation of the Good and the Incarnation ofChrist, is an affair of self-manifestation or self-presentation sharply distinctfrom any mere representation. It is, Carpenter argues, with these doctrines inview that we may best comprehend Gadamer’s ontology of the truth-event.

Another representative text from Hermeneutics and Truth is an articleentitled “Gadamer’s Realism: The ‘Belongingness’ of Word and Reality,”authored by the volume’s editor. Wachterhauser offers in this piece a not alto-gether standard reading of Gadamer according to which he is said to upholda form of epistemological realism. According to Wachterhauser, Gadamerdefends a theory of knowledge and truth that is at once fully mindful ofthe historically conditioned and linguistically mediated character of inter-pretation while remaining in some sense “reality-based,” a theory that hecharacterizes as a “perspectival realism.” On this reading, Gadamer attemptsto reconcile a version of realism – one “which maintains that our disputesmust be about what is real in some sense independently of the inquirer’s mindand place in history” (p. 149) – with the recognition that interpretation issituated within finite linguistic perspectives. While it is always through themedium of language that interpretation occurs, it is nonetheless the thingsthemselves (indeed “reality in itself”) that interpretation makes available forconsciousness. This particular “reality in itself,” however, is “not the KantianDing-an-sich, which is always behind our representations, but the Hegelianreality in itself which is not forever behind the appearances but given to us inand with the appearances” (p. 152). Gadamer’s unique version of the realistthesis is one that refuses to posit any form of duality between word and object,and instead regards language as the medium in which particular aspects ofthe subject matter, or die Sachen selbst (and decidedly not objects in theirentirety), are disclosed. Furthermore, true interpretations on Wachterhauser’sreading may be said both to be about the things themselves and to be ade-quate (indeed to correspond) to them, although the correspondence relationfunctions only as an analysis, and not as a criterion, of truth. For Gadamer, it

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is coherence rather than correspondence that represents the criterion of truthin interpretation. “Like Hegel, Gadamer proposes an analysis of the conceptof truth in terms of correspondence but insists on coherence as a criterionof truth” (p. 153). It is coherent interpretations that yield the truth about thesubject matter, with the important qualifications that such truths are alwayspartial disclosures which remain invariably subject to further reinterpretationand contestation.

Wachterhauser’s contention that Gadamer is flirting with epistemologicalrealism (one form of it) and correspondence theory is certain to be contestedby many. However, his assertion that it is coherence that for Gadamer andsome other hermeneuticists constitutes the principal criterion of truth in inter-pretation is an insight that is both important and frequently overlooked. Whilethe primary focus of Gadamer’s reflections on truth has never been the issueof the criteria that allow for a reasoned adjudication of interpretations, andwhile he undoubtedly appropriates a roughly Heideggerian view of truth asaletheia, it remains that Gadamer also regards coherence as the principal cri-terion of truth in interpretation. The many questions that this raises, however –concerning the feasibility of coherence theory in its different forms, whethersuch a theory is fully compatible with philosophical hermeneutics, and relatedissues – are not treated in this volume and must await further discussion. Aparticular question raised by the volume’s discussion of themes such as coher-ence, contextualism, and hermeneutic plurality concerns the relation betweenhermeneutics and the pragmatic tradition, a school of thought that sharesconsiderable common ground with hermeneutics on the subject of truth (aswell as on numerous other issues). Supporting a coherence theory of muchrelevance to issues of truth in hermeneutics, pragmatism is not a subject ofdiscussion in the volume, and this is perhaps its main shortcoming.

Notwithstanding this, Hermeneutics and Truth represents an impressiveand valuable collection of texts concerned with a central area of inquiry inhermeneutics, and it is sure to find a wide audience among philosophers andothers interested in the problem of truth in interpretation. Its appeal is by nomeans limited to proponents of philosophical hermeneutics, but extends to allthose who believe that questions of truth must be posed anew in the aftermathof foundationalism.

Paul FairfieldMcMaster University, Canada