Hermeneutics - The Art Of Interpretation Of Sacred Texts, Hermeneutics As The Methodological Basis Of The Human Sciences
contemporary thinking tradition
Traditionally understood as the art of interpretation (ars hermeneutica) that provided rules for the interpretation of sacred texts, hermeneutics today serves to characterize a broad current in contemporary continental philosophy that deals with the issues of interpretation and stresses the historical and linguistic nature of our world-experience. Since this characterization is also valid for contemporary thinking as a whole, the boundaries of hermeneutics are difficult to delineate with pinpoint accuracy. In contemporary thought it is mostly associated with the thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), who continues the hermeneutic tradition of thinkers such as Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). All three authors unfolded a distinct philosophical understanding of hermeneutics (that is, interpretation theory) that drew on the more ancient tradition of hermeneutics. Since their thinking is a radicalization of and reaction to this older conception, it is with it that one must start.
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Originally, hermeneutics was developed as an auxiliary discipline in the fields that deal with the interpretation of canonical texts, i.e. texts that contain authoritative meaning such as sacred or judicial texts. Hermeneutic rules were especially required when one was confronted with ambiguous passages (ambigua) of Scripture. Some of the most influential treatises in this regard were St. Augustin…
Most familiar with the thinking and life of Schleiermacher, of whom he was the biographer, Dilthey devoted his lifework to the challenge of a foundation of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). Whereas the exact sciences had already received, in the wake of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, a philosophical base and a methodology guaranteeing the validity of their knowledge, the…
Seizing upon this idea that life is intrinsically interpretative, the early Heidegger spoke of a "hermeneutical intuition" as early as 1919. His teacher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) had reinstated the urgency and legitimacy of primal "intuition" in philosophy. But Heidegger revealed himself a reader of Dilthey when he stressed that every intuition is hermeneutical.…
Hans-Georg Gadamer's project is strongly influenced by Heidegger, but in his masterpiece Truth and Method (1960) his starting point is undoubtedly provided by Dilthey's hermeneutical inquiry on the methodology of the human sciences. While taking anew the dialogue with the human sciences and the open question of their claim to truth, Gadamer calls into question Dilthey's premis…
The history of hermeneutics after Gadamer can be read as a history of the debates provoked by Truth and Method. Some of the first responses to Gadamer were sparked by the methodological notion of hermeneutics that prevailed in the tradition of Dilthey. After all, it had been the dominant conception of hermeneutics until Gadamer (with the sole, albeit very peculiar, exception of Heidegger's …
Bernstein, Richard J. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Sees in the hermeneutical rehabilitation of common sense a parallel to pragmatism and a corrective to the bugbear of relativism. Betti, Emilio. "Hermeneutics as the General Methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften." 1962. Reprinted in Conte…
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