The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst Tugendhat

Santiago Zabala is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Potsdam University Institute of Philosophy. He is the author of The Remains of Being (forthcoming), and editor of Nihilism and Emancipation, Art's Claim to Truth, The Future of Religion, and Weakening Philosophy.

Contemporary philosophers, analytic as well as continental, tend to feel uneasy about Ernst Tugendhat, who, though he positions himself in the analytic field, poses questions in the Heideggerian style. According to Tugendhat, only formal semantics can answer the questions left open by Heidegger. In the words of Rüdiger Bubner, one of Hans-Georg Gadamer's most distinguished disciples, "Tugendhat, instead of following the aesthetic line followed by Heidegger's essay on The Essence of the Work of Art and largely taken over by Gadamer's hermeneutics, chooses the logical direction, seeking in formal semantics a differentiated and precise answer to the ontological question of Being."

What Tugendhat seeks to answer is this: What is the meaning of thought following the linguistic turn? Because of the rift between analytic and continental philosophers, very few studies have been written on Tugendhat, and he has been omitted altogether from several histories of philosophy. Now that the separation between these two schools has begun to narrow, Tugendhat has become an example of a philosopher who "built bridges between continents and between countries." Tugendhat is known more for his philosophical turn than for his phenomenological studies or for his position within analytic philosophy, and this creates some confusion regarding his philosophical setting. Is Tugendhat analytic or continental? Is he a follower of Wittgenstein or Heidegger? Does he belong in the culture of analysis or in that of tradition? The aim of this book is to present Tugendhat as an example of merged horizons, and by doing so prove that any such labels impoverish philosophical research.