Continental · c. 1805 – today
Hermeneutics
Understanding is interpretation: we grasp texts, people and history by moving between parts and whole, always from within a tradition.
What happens when we understand a text, a person or a past?
Interpretation began as a craft for reading scripture and law. Schleiermacher, amid the Romantic interest in language and individuality, turned it into a general theory of understanding; Dilthey then used it to argue that the human sciences need their own method, not the methods of physics.
We understand a sentence only through the whole text, and the whole only through its sentences: the “hermeneutic circle”. Gadamer added that we never stand outside history; our prejudices are not just errors but the starting point of understanding, which happens as a “fusion of horizons” between our world and the text’s.
- Parts and whole illuminate each other in the hermeneutic circle.
- The human sciences aim at understanding, not causal explanation.
- All understanding is shaped by history and tradition.
It reshaped literary theory, theology, law and the social sciences, and underlies debates about whether objectivity is possible in the humanities.
Thinkers
1768–1834Friedrich SchleiermacherBerlin theologian and translator of Plato, father of modern hermeneutics1833–1911Wilhelm DiltheyGerman historian of ideas who defended the human sciences1900–2002Hans-Georg GadamerHeidegger’s student, who made hermeneutics a philosophy of understanding1913–2005Paul RicœurFrench philosopher who joined phenomenology, hermeneutics and narrativeKey texts
Where it came from
Grew out ofPatristic & Augustinian philosophyAugustine’s On Christian Doctrine set out rules for interpreting scripture that later hermeneutics generalised.Grew out of
Kant’s critical philosophyDilthey sought a “critique of historical reason” to do for the human sciences what Kant had done for natural science.Grew out of
PhenomenologyHeidegger made understanding a basic way of human existence, and Gadamer and Ricœur built on that.
Its answers to the big questions
Logic & languageCan words grasp the truth?Understanding is a fusion of horizons between the reader and the text.On the record
Hermeneutics as a school is dated from 1805, Schleiermacher’s first lectures on it.
Schleiermacher first lectured on hermeneutics in 1805, while teaching at Halle, and gave the course repeatedly until 1833; his lecture notes were published after his death, in 1838.
Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher”