The Language of Hermeneutics probes the most intense points of proximity between the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the poetizing thinking of his great teacher, Martin Heidegger--points of proximity which nevertheless show as clearly as possible the critical points of departure that set these two thinkers on separate parallel thought paths. By focusing exclusively on these two thinkers' respective readings of Plato, Aristotle, Holderlin, and Hegel, this book shows how Gadamer effectively deconstructs his mentor's architectonic of the history of being and retrieves from it a new mode of philosophizing that recognizes and embraces the fundamentally ironic structure of the world and boldly risks an interpretation of it.