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GADAMER, Hans-Georg. Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. xiv + 172 pp. Cloth, $25.00-This collection contains some of Gadamer's best essays, including: "Kant and the Question of God" (1941); "On the Possibility of a Philosophical Ethics" (1963); "On the Divine in Early Greek Thought" (1970); "The Ontological Problem of Value" (1971); "Thinking as Redemption: Plotinus between Plato and Augustine" (1980); "Myth in the Age of Science" (1981); "The Ethics of Value and Practical Philosophy" (1982); "Reflections on the Relation of Religion and Science" (1984); "Friendship and Self-Knowledge: Reflections on the Role of Friendship in Greek Ethics" (1985); and "Aristotle and Imperative Ethics" (1989). Rather than describe each essay, this review will content itself with presenting the predominant ethical and theological doctrines found in this compilation.
Gadamer builds his moral doctrine on a sound Aristotelianism. Rejecting the unconditional and a priori, he grounds ethics precisely in the conditionedness of man, especially in the determinations arising from family, society, and state. In fact, Gadamer's sense of this conditionedness is so strong that he examines the human only "within the horizon" (p. 32) of that comprehensive society natural to it-the polls. For it is under this inevitable influence of the polis-the influence of training, education, and way...