Gadamer:Ethics and the Dialogic Character of Play

Hans-Georg Gadamer's project of philosophical hermeneutics is an interpretive welcome for new insights and meaning, emerging from respectful dialogic encounter with the particularity of a given text. Gadamer's revelatory undertaking walks between the extremes of subjectivism and objectivism. As the title of Richard Bernstein's(1983) book, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, still suggests, there is a life world between interpreter and text. This dialogic meeting of a text constitutes a meaningful third, a living form of interpretive semiosis. This new dwelling, a horizon of revelatory meaning, garners life via dialogic play that engages a text in the interpretive process of respectful seriousness.