In 1963 he moved to Heidelberg and studied with Karl Löwith, Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer with a scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

For his works, he received honorary degrees from the universities of La Plata, Palermo, Madrid, Havana, and San Marcos of Lima.

This requires that the foundational certainties of modernity with its emphasis on objective truth founded in a rational unitary subject be relinquished for a more multi-faceted conception closer to that of the arts.

An ethics of communication along the lines suggested by Jürgen Habermas suffers, according to Vattimo, from finding itself in a substantially ahistorical position, while oscillating between formalism and cultural relativism (1992:117).

For Vattimo it is only when hermeneutics accepts its nihilistic destiny that "it can find in 'negativity,' in dissolution as the 'destiny of Being' ... the orientating principle that enables it to realize its own original inclination for ethics whilst neither restoring metaphysics nor surrendering to the futility of a relativistic philosophy of culture" (1992:119).

In 2004, after leaving the party of the Democrats of the Left, he endorsed Marxism, reassessing positively its projection principles and wishing for a "return" to the thought of the Trier philosopher and to a communism, rid of distorted Soviet developments, which have to be dialectically overcome.

"[11] Vattimo added his name to a petition released on 28 February 2009, calling on the European Union to remove Hamas from its list of terrorist organizations and grant it full recognition as a legitimate voice of the Palestinian people.

On 22 July 2014, in response to the IDF military operation on Gaza, Vattimo said he would personally like to "shoot those bastard Zionists" and thinks Europeans should raise money "to buy Hamas some more rockets".

Reacting to his "Zionist bastards" statements and to others like it, the foreign ministers for Italy, France and Germany said that they condemn such language as well as violence that has occurred at pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Europe.

"In a telephone interview [...], Gianni Vattimo said he “regrets” such words and “feels ashamed” by them",[16] claiming he was "provoked" by the hosts of the show on which he made his comments.