  It has been argued against Gadamer that his revaluation of tradition does not really bring its content to a point of critical reflection. He acknowledges that like any other temporal phenomenon, not all of its vistas can be adequately thematised or articulated. This does not mean, however, that tradition is beyond critical appraisal. Traditions can, as Pannenberg argues, check their normative assumptions against their self-projections. Other critics suggest that Gadamer’s approach to tradition and aesthetics is overtly Classical in its preoccupation with forms that maintain a continuity through time rather than radically alter themselves. It does not allow for those radical intrusions or revolutionary interjections which alter the perceptual paradigm of an age. The counter-objection is not only that the charge overlooks Gadamer’s embrace of Heidegger’s quite radical phenomenological reworking of the Classical tradition, but also the fact that for one paradigm to replace another, there must be a certain relation between them. One must address an absence, fulfil an unseen possibility or a lack, within the other. Cubism, for example, implies a visual orientation quite different from realism, but both idioms belong to a common tradition in that they strive to show us something of the real. Without a degree of continuity with tradition, any radical emergence would have no bearing upon the received and thereby lack the ability to call into question received notions and understanding. It is, however, precisely the challenge of the different and the other which is the driver of Gadamer’s dialogical conception of tradition. It is a conception which is in part modernistic: tradition is presented as being in constant debate with itself. Its renewal demands change and transformation. Furthermore, a virtue of this dialogical conception of tradition is that it is not culturally specific. Because its main focus is on the subject-matters which different cultural practices address, it offers a model of cognitive engagement that can operate between distinct traditions rather than in just any one.