By Pádraig Hogan , 2015
“It is not so much our judgements as it is our prejudices that constitute our being,” writes Hans-Georg Gadamer in the opening paper of a collection of his essays titled Philosophical Hermeneutics (Gadamer 1976). This claim is a provocative one and announces one of the more memorable motifs in Gadamer’s writings. It also pursues in fresh directions a new note in the twentieth-century Western philosophy originally introduced by Heidegger. But more importantly for educational purposes, as we shall see, it opens up some promising paths for how teaching and learning are to be thought about, researched, and carried out.