born Feb. 11, 1900, Marburg, Ger.
died March 13, 2002, Heidelberg
German philosopher whose system of philosophical hermeneutics, derived in part from the ideas of Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, was influential in 20th-century Continental philosophy , aesthetics , theology , and literary criticism .
The son of a chemistry professor, Gadamer studied the humanities at the universities of Breslau, Marburg, Freiburg, and Munich, earning a doctorate in philosophy under Heidegger at Freiburg in 1922. He later taught at the universities of Frankfurt am Main (1947–49) and Heidelberg (from 1949), where he became professor emeritus in 1968. In his most important work, Truth and Method (1960), Gadamer developed a general theory of understanding and interpretation modeled on the experience of art.