Gadamer on Heidegger: Is the History of Being “just” Another Philosophy of History?

This paper takes up the issue of Gadamer’s appropriation of Heidegger’s later philosophy, and it does so in terms of a critical examination of those aspects of Heidegger’s being-historical perspective that Gadamer seems to question, and sometimes explicitly reject. I argue that Gadamer’s criticism of the later Heidegger is based on three basic reasons: a partial refusal of the latter’s interpretations of Greek philosophy (especially Plato); a strong refusal of his concept of the language of metaphysics; and, above all, an interpretation of Heidegger’s history of the forgetfulness of being as a form of philosophy of history which shares with Hegel’s one a genuinely eschatological self-consciousness that Gadamer, for his part, doesn’t endorse. Given these assumptions, I finally try to highlight some consequences of Gadamer’s peculiar and ‘selective’ reception of the later Heidegger in the realm of aesthetics.