Though Fairfield discusses the spirit of hermeneutics only in passing, it is, first and last, deeply akin to that of Heidegger's philosophy, as his concluding sentence of the book unmistakably indicates (though the spirit of Gadamerian hermeneutics is of course hardly separable in critical respects from that of its Heideggerian inspiration). Less ontological perhaps, less preoccupied with questions of existence and being, allegedly more concerned with issues of experience and interpretation, "post-Heideggerian hermeneutics," as conceived -- indeed, as enacted -- by Fairfield, is nonetheless discernibly Heideggerian. This is hardly anything Fairfield would deny, given how deeply Gadamerian he is and, in turn, given how resolutely Gadamer himself was to affirming and even celebrating the continuity of tradition, especially in the face of ruptures and displacements.

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