This volume analyses Virginia Woolf’s novels through a philosophical lens, providing an interpretive overview of her works through Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic ontology. The text argues that interpretation itself is the central subject matter of Woolf’s novels: in order to understand these novels in all of their complexity and depth, it is both useful and helpful to comprehend the interpretive pillars that inform these narratives. Indeed, interpretation became a central theme during the Modernist movement, and Woolf’s novels took part in this conversation. For his part, Gadamer was in important voice in these discussions, dedicating his life’s work to the concept of interpretation. Gadamer focused on the universality of interpretation, arguing that it is inescapable and irrevocably bound up with existence. In many ways, Woolf’s novels represent an enactment of Gadamer’s philosophy, as they emphasize the radical questionability of the world—what this interpretive imperative requires of its participants and the potential yield that may result. On the other end, Gadamer’s philosophy acquires a concrete praxis when applied to Woolf’s novels. His philosophy hinges on the universality of interpretation as it manifests itself in daily existence; the literary text and its interpretation participate in this universality and is shaped by it.

Overall, the point of this project is to plumb the affinities between Gadamer's notion of hermeneutic ontology and Virginia Woolf's novels -- how these affinities illuminate and contribute to an improved understanding of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and Woolf's novels. For their part, Gadamer and Woolf belong to a similar cultural and historical milieu, each, in one way or another, a participant in the intellectual and artistic movement known as Modernism. This movement arose in response to the encroaching impersonality of scientific objectivity: both Woolf and Gadamer recognized the pitfalls of this objectivity, as it necessarily discounts the interpretive opportunity and responsibility of the individual. In Virginia Woolf's novels, we witness an intensification and enactment of one's interpretive imperative. In their structure and thematics, we encounter narratives that emphasize interpretive experiences and concepts -- in them there is a heavy accent on those experiences that are binding, those experiences that shape consciousness and determine one's interpretive horizon. Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical outlook is especially useful for an analysis of these novels because his philosophy concerns the interpretation of day to day existence as it relates to the interpretation of a literary text. For its part, this philosophical framework hinges on the primacy of language -- its universality and our unconsciousness of it -- our belongingness to art -- its ability to engage the meaningfulness of our perceptions and alter them too -- and the dialogical situation in which all language use occurs -- every utterance belongs to an occasion, its meaning only understandable as it relates to its context. Woolf's novels, for their part, highlight and emphasize these hermeneutic and ontological precepts. In these narratives, we encounter characters who interpret their existence; this interpretive dynamic -- and the philosophical precepts that undergird them -- are decisive for the significance and impact of these novels; interpretation and meaning are, in fact, the primary subject matter. I will argue that -- as others have noted -- a philosophical approach is useful for understanding these novels in their full scope, that there is a philosophical undercurrent that runs through these narratives, but that the philosophical scholarship on Woolf fails to fully appreciate the hermeneutic and ontological underpinnings that are decisive for their meaning. Instead of reading these novels through a lens of radical interpretation and questionability, the present scholarship relies on static concepts such as world, self, and reality. My argument is that these concepts are not static, that they are in movement as the individual engages with language, with art, and with others. In many ways, these novels are defined by this movement -- how one's understanding and horizon is shaped by this engagement -- and the consequences and implications therein. In relating Woolf's novels to Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, the reader acquires an improved sense for the reference of the words that populate her novels, words that determine the meaning of a world and the characters who inhabit it: these narratives include characters who strive to understand, who either fail or succeed based on their willingness to privilege and engage with experiences of language, of art, or dialogue with others. Now, in relating Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics to Woolf's novels, the reader encounters an enactment of Gadamer's philosophical outlook: interpretation is inescapable -- whether reading or living an average day, the world and its meaning are forever in motion and it is up to the individual to respond in kind.

The book is a meditation on beauty and Being, interrogating affinities between Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and Virginia Woolf's philosophy of beauty and Being embodied in her oeuvre. It addresses beauty as a mode of being rather than a mere adornment of human existence.

Hans-Georg Gadamer is depicted as a paradoxical figure in the literature. When Gadamer’s work is approached by itself, outside the history of hermeneutics, he is generally presented as the disciple of Martin Heidegger, whose main theoretical contribution lies in having transposed his ontological hermeneutics into the sphere of the human sciences. Usually the master-student relation ends with a break between the two brought about by the student’s desire to become herself a master. In Gadamer and Heidegger’s case, scholarship has always excluded the possibility of such a symbolic parricide. However, when Gadamer’s work is approached from the history of hermeneutics, he, not Heidegger, is revered as the central figure of hermeneutic theory in the twentieth century, and scholars perceive the works of the latter—together with those of his immediate forerunners Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey—as mere preambles to the great hermeneutic theory proposed by Truth and Method, and the works of those following him as footnotes to it. Gadamer and the Question of Understanding: Between Heidegger and Derrida dismantles this paradox by showing, on the one hand, that Gadamer’s translation of Heidegger involved, as he himself says, a series of “essential alterations” to the original which make philosophical hermeneutics a more coherent and better articulated hermeneutic theory, one offering a more faithful description of the phenomenon of understanding than Heidegger’s. And, on the other hand, by taking the dossier of the famous encounter between Gadamer and Derrida as its cue, Adrian Costache demonstrates that in light of Derrida’s deconstruction, every step Gadamer takes forward from Heidegger as well as from Schleiermacher and Dilthey—however necessary--is problematic in itself. The insights in this book will be valuable to students and scholars interested in modern and contemporary European philosophy, especially those focusing on philosophical hermeneutics and deconstruction, as well as those working in social sciences that have incorporated a hermeneutic approach to their investigations, such as pedagogy, sociology, psychotherapy, law, and nursing.

This title, first published in 1991, opens with an account by Gadamer of his own life and work and their relation to the achievements of hermeneutics. Building upon the key theme of dialogue, Gadamer and Hermeneutics provides a series of essays, either linked Gadamer to other major contemporary philosophers or focusing on a given Gadamerian theme. This book will be of interest to students of literary theory.

'This volume presents carefully selected essays from Gadamer's Kleine Schriften. The seven essays comprising Part 1 contain Gadamer's discussion of hermeneutical reflection. Part 2 consists of six essays dealing with phenomenology, existential philosophy, and philosophical hermeneutics.

Dealing extensively with Gadamer's later writings, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other shows neglected and widely misunderstood dimensions of Gadamer's hermeneutics: historicity, finitude, truth, the importance of the other, and the eminence of the poetic text.

In this book, internationally recognized scholars in philosophical hermeneutics discuss various aspects of language and linguisticality. The translations of Hans-Georg Gadamer's two recent essays provoke a preliminary discussion on the philosopher's polemic claim in Truth and Method--"Being that can be understood is language." Topics addressed by the contributors include the relationship of rituals to tradition and the immemorial; the unity of the word; conversation; translation and conceptuality; and the interrelationship between the art of writing and linguisticality. This work is of critical importance to anyone interested in Gadamer's claims regarding the boundaries of language, the transition from the prelinguistic to linguistic realms, and the role of rituals in this transition.

Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy collects together Gadamer's remaining important untranslated writings on the problem of history and the major philosophical traditions of the 20th century from the standpoint of hermeneutics. In these writings, Gadamer examines important thinkers as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Bourdieu and Habermas and their ongoing legacies. This volume also includes a preface by the editors, who are also the translators, presenting the structure of the volume, a substantial introductionsituating Gadamer's particular project and examining the place of hermeneutics vis-a-vis the disciplines of history and philosophy in the 20th century. The translation is followed by a glossary of German terms and Greek and Latin expressions, as well as a bibliography of all the works cited and alluded to by Gadamer.