Volume 48, 2014
Heidegger at the Beach
Bradley Warfield
Pages 21-30
Play as Polemos
Gadamer and Heidegger on the Truth-Disclosing Event
Much has been written about Heidegger's various influences on Gadamer's thinking, especially as the latter culminates in Truth and Method. Scholars often point to the way Heidegger's notions of “thrownness” and “historicity” in Being and Time (BT) influence Gadamer's insistence on the centrality of tradition for hermeneutical understanding, and his notions of the “fusion of horizons” (horizontverschmelzung) and the “hermeneutic circle.”1 But scholars have appeared to overlook, or at least underestimate, the influence some of Heidegger's other notions have exerted on Gadamer's thought. In this paper I want to address crucial aspects of this neglect; I shall explore the relation between Heidegger's notion, as he explains it in Introduction to Metaphysics (IM), of truth as unconcealment (aletheia), and compare it to Gadamer's notion, as he describes it in Truth and Method, of truth as emergent, in play (Spiel), from the event (Ereignis) of conversation and of the work of art.