School of thought

Hermeneutics

Tradition

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Classification

Period
c. 1838 CE onward
Regions
Europe (origin)
Domains
Epistemology, Philosophy of Language

Overview

Hermeneutics is the philosophy of interpretation and understanding. Gadamer argued that understanding is not a neutral method but always involves the interpreter's historical situation and prejudices (pre-understandings). Genuine understanding occurs through a 'fusion of horizons' — where the interpreter's perspective and the text's horizon meet and produce new meaning.

Key ideas

  • Hermeneutic Circle: We understand the parts through the whole and the whole through the parts. Understanding is circular: every interpretation presupposes prior understanding, which is revised through further interpretation.
  • Fusion of Horizons: Understanding is not reproducing an author's original intention but a productive encounter between the reader's 'horizon' (historical situation) and the text's horizon.
  • Productive Prejudice: Gadamer rehabilitates 'prejudice' (Vorurteil): pre-understandings are not only obstacles to truth but the very conditions that make understanding possible. Some prejudices do mislead; the text's resistance and the distance of time are what sort the productive ones from the misleading.

Key figures

Friedrich Schleiermacher · Wilhelm Dilthey · Hans-Georg Gadamer · Paul Ricoeur

Methods used

Influenced by

  • Phenomenology

    This is the twentieth-century phase rather than Schleiermacher's: Heidegger recast understanding as a basic way of being in the world rather than a technique for reading texts, and Gadamer built Truth and Method on that recasting.

  • Romanticism

Reacts to

References

  • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Hermeneutics
  • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Hermeneutics, §2.1; Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Introduction — Formation: Schleiermacher's teaching and writings in Germany, collected posthumously in 1838.
  • Truth and Method — Hans-Georg Gadamer
  • Interpretation Theory — Paul Ricoeur