Maggs Bros.

A major association copy of one of Jasper’s principal works of existentialism, inscribed by the author to the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) in black ink to the front free endpaper: ‘Hans Gadamer mit herzlichen grüsse! K. Jaspers’. With a few instances of neat pencilled underlings and marginal highlighting in Gadamer’s hand and a carbon copy sheet loosely inserted listing the 34 participants presenting at the Jaspers Festival beginning November 1942 – Number 13 being Prof. Gadamer of Leipzig speaking on Der Gottsfrege der Philosophie (The Question of God in Philosophy).

Gadamer was ‘the decisive figure in the development of twentieth century hermeneutics’ (Stanford), best-known for his 1960 magnum opus Wahrheit und Methode. ‘Gadamer was ‘profoundly affected by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger’, although he employed ‘a more orthodox and modest, but also more accessible style than Heidegger himself. Central to Gadamer’s mature philosophy is a distinctive and thoroughly dialogical approach, based in Platonic-Aristotelian as well as Heideggerian thinking, that rejects subjectivism and relativism, abjures any simple notion of interpretive method, and grounds understanding in the linguistically mediated happening of tradition’ (Stanford).

Gefken and Kunert, Karl Jaspers: Eine Bibliographie, 218.