Since its publication in 1960, Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method has come to redefine the meaning of hermeneutics. In Gadamer's work, hermeneutics is no longer a methodological tool for classicists, theologians, or legal scholars but a fully fledged philosophical account of truth, meaning, and rationality. The reception of Truth and Method traverses the traditional distinction between Anglo-American and European philosophy. Over the past forty years or so, Truth and Method has been critiqued, discussed, and adopted in the work of Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Ernst Tugendhat, Jacques Derrida, Charles Taylor, Paul Ricoeur, Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom. Yet, in the reception of Gadamer's work, diverse and wide-spanning as it is, one aspect of his thinking is systematically left out: the relationship between hermeneutics and German Idealism. There are, to be sure, a number of studies of Gadamer's relation to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. There is also no shortage of works that examine Gadamer's indebtedness to his teacher, Martin Heidegger, or even his relation to Habermas and critical theory. His reading of Kant, Fichte, Schleiermacher, the romantics, and Hegel, however, has for the most part been left unvisited.

The present study argues that Gadamer's critique of German Idealism is integral to his hermeneutics. At the center of this critique is the idea that reason ought reflectively to investigate the epistemic, moral, political, and aesthetic norms with which it identifies.