Hans-Georg Gadamer’s on the Aristotelian Protrepticus

Ethics and Politics in the Socratic-Platonic Tradition

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present and analyse the main hypotheses of Hans-Georg Gadamer in Der aristotelische Protreptikos und die entwicklungsgeschichtliche Betrachtung der aristotelischen Ethik (1928), emphasizing the Gadamerian reception of the notions of phrónesis, hedoné and, to a lesser extent, phýsis. It will be attempted to show that in this early work of Gadamer there is more than a methodological and interpretative debate regarding the Protrepticus and the Aristotelian ethics. Lastly, the paper argues that it is possible to read in the main arguments of this early essay the first intellectual maturation of relevance of Gadamer, expressed in the form of a critical dialogue with his great masters (Paul Natorp, Nicolai Hartmann, Martin Heidegger, Paul Friedländer), departing from the new interpretative possibilities that philology and phenomenology opened to his studies on the ethical-political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. The theoretical consequences of this early article would have both paved the way of Gadamer’s next theoretical interventions regarding Platonic political philosophy as well as for the future developments of philosophical hermeneutics.