Making Cusa Explicit : on Cassirer, Gadamer and the Hermeneutics of Explication

In this article I discuss Cassirer's interpretation of Nicholas of Cusa inThe Individual and The Cosmos, published a few years before his participationwith Heidegger in the Davos conference in 1929. At issue is Cusa'simportance for the rise of modernity in scientific rationality and the theoryof knowledge: the explications of Cusa's mathematical models and visio intellectualisbecame precursors to the Platonism of the new science. WhileHeidegger nowhere commented on Cusa in this regard, his student, Gadamer, both in Truth and Method and elsewhere, gave special place to Cusain the emergence of the modernity of hermeneutics in general. That is,without denying Cassirer's interpretation, he insisted on further emphasizingCusa's explications both in relation to the transcendence heuristicallyat stake in Cusa's innovative theology and the originality in his account oflanguage, in both respects already abandoning what Cassirer called thecopy theory of knowledge and truth.

Finally, further contrasting them withthe modern account of formal explication that runs from Hobbes to Carnapand beyond, I consider what these thinker's differences imply for theirrespective accounts of phenomenology and hermeneutics. [Publisher's text]

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