Types Book

I find the idea of rating Truth and Method on a star system kind of offensive after Gadamer did so much to overturn the ontological prejudice that being is what can be quantified.

Reading this book was one of the joys of my life (I finished it July 4 three years ago, happy to ignore the jingoistic explosions all around me), and I honestly didn't find it all that difficult. I wouldn't lie about that: who would deny that continental philosophy is often EXTREMELY difficult? At times in my reading life I've been bludgeoned by Husserl, Heidegger, even Merleau-Ponty, but not Gadamer. Yet he's fully the peer of these other thinkers. By the end of Truth and Method I felt illuminated, not beaten-down.

In his own words:

"The structure of play absorbs the player into itself, and thus frees him from the burden of taking the initiative, which constitutes the actual strain of existence."

"Each science, as science, has in advance projected a field of objects such that to know them is to govern them."

(this is contrasted with...)

"In understanding we are drawn into an event of truth and arrive, as it were, too late if we want to know what we are supposed to believe."

"Being that can be understood is language."