Gadamer on Plato

Hans-Georg Gadamer has a view on Plato’s conception of knowledge, according to which our knowledge of reality can only be incomplete. This challenging view is closely tied to his own hermeneutic understanding of knowledge. But it has proved difficult to clarify his interpretation of Plato. This difficulty of clarification spills over into his own hermeneutics. Nicholas White, as a scholar of Platonic metaphysics and epistemology, perplexed by aspects of Gadamer’s view, sought clarification and posed three questions for Gadamer. Gadamer answered these questions. This interchange is the subject of this paper, and our goal is to clarify Gadamer’s interpretation of Plato. We further argue that Gadamer’s understanding of Plato’s realism, unlike that of White, is intended to be amenable to our times.