- Lived:
- 1900–2002 · Marburg, Breslau, Leipzig, Heidelberg — a life exactly as long as its century
- Tradition:
- Philosophical hermeneutics — the philosophy of understanding and interpretation
- The Big Idea:
- Understanding is not a technique you apply to texts; it is what human beings are — and it happens as conversation, where your horizon and another's meet and both are changed.
- If you remember one thing:
- "Being that can be understood is language" — we never step outside interpretation to check reality bare; but because language can always say more, no horizon is a prison.