STARTING FROM HANS-GEORG GADAMER. THE “KOINÉ” AND THE BRIDGE BETWEEN TWO CULTURES

The following contribution starts out going through the pages where Hans Georg Gadamer recalls his early youth and his first university studies in Breslavia. In those pages Gadamer emphasizes more than once a particular “foundational” exigence, the need “to throw a bridge”, to articulate in new terms the dialogue between humanistic tradition and positive sciences. That fundamental exigence “to throw a bridge” of a new relationship with scientific knowledge is one of the essential features of contemporary hermeneutics. Italy was the first country to publish the first translation of Gadamer’s main work, Wahrheit und Methode. And in Italy alone, in last year’s philosophical debate around the hermeneutic koiné finds in the relationship with science (natural sciences, scientific knowledge) as it has been interpreted by hermeneutics so far, and in the exigency to finally reformulate that relationship in less “aesthetical-metaphysical” terms, the place where hermeneutics may recognize its own nihilistic sense: to correspond to the becoming (flowing) of nihilism, that is of modernity, means first of all to mark the distance from the attitudes that hermeneutic philosophers have so far had with regard to the positive sciences.