On Dennis Schmidt: The Sensibility of Understanding as Practical Philosophy

Dennis Schmidt has long been for me not just a friend in philosophy, but a true scholar of note. My own work has been informed by reading his work and hearing him speak on numerous occasions. I have indeed learned much from him, for which I am thankful. As to this friendship, it has been built up, in part, through sharing in common a philosophical sensibility originating in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. The work of this philosopher, oddly enough, one might say, is about the very idea of philosophical sensibility, where the word “sensibility” indicates, as we learn from its earliest use, a way of understanding things. It is clear to me that Schmidt has followed the impetus of his teacher’s work. He too is concerned with the way of understanding understanding, with the sensibility of understanding, and has done so in a singular way. He is indeed a scholar and thinker in his own right. To speak then of his work as a scholar and thinker, I want to begin by indicating the way in which I think Dennis Schmidt marks out the sensibility of understanding in his work. He does so not by relegating the way of understanding things to experiences of meaning, as one might find in traditional hermeneutic theory concerned with the reading of history and texts in general; rather, he does so by linking it to the very way-making of life. In a more precise sense, I would say that his philosophical concern is with our concernful being