Over the past decade, Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method (1960) has enjoyed a renaissance. With its concern for the question of validity in interpretation, the so-called Gadamer–Habermas debate has faded into the background. So has the discussion between Gadamer and Derrida over the relationship between hermeneutics and deconstruction. When philosophers such as Richard Rorty, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom turn to Gadamer, it is in order to find support for the notions of Bildung, historicity, and the linguistic nature of reason.

While it offers new perspectives on Gadamer's work, the recent Anglophone reception overlooks how philosophical hermeneutics develops in critical interaction with German Idealism and its legacy in modern aesthetics and philosophy of art. Through a critical investigation of Truth and Method, the present study argues that Gadamer's engagement with Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schleiermacher is integral to his understanding of hermeneutic reason and that a failure to engage with this aspect of Gadamer's philosophy leads to a misunderstanding of the most pressing problem of post-Heideggerian hermeneutics: the tension between the commitment to the self-criticism of reason, on the one hand, and the turn towards the meaning-constituting authority of tradition, on the other. Arguing that Gadamer fundamentally misconstrues the legacy of German Idealism, this book proposes that this tension can only be overcome by a return to early nineteenth-century hermeneutics as it develops in the wake of the Enlightenment and Kant's critical philosophy.