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This chapter is a critique of the positivist reception of hermeneutics. This reception was marked by the positivist theory of historical explanation as subsumption under a covering law or a causal generalization. It is argued that this theory cannot explain many aspects of historical method, specifically those that are used to reconstruct events in the past. The positivist assumes that the past is a given and then attempts to find a covering law to explain it; but most historical research has to reconstruct a past that is not given and is not concerned with the discovery of law-like regularities. The positivist polemic against hermeneutics is also discussed and it is argued that this rests upon a caricature, as if hermeneutics were nothing more than empathy. Last but not least, the chapter is an examination of Weber’s theory that historical understanding requires both causal and normative explanation where normative explanation is not reducible to causal explanation.
Both Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth think Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics gives insufficient space for the operations of critical reflection. This chapter briefly explores the trajectory Max Horkheimer sets for the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and then turns to the way Habermas and Honneth take up Critical Theory’s concerns in their engagement with Gadamer’s work. Habermas challenges what he sees as the precedence Gadamer gives to the authority of tradition over reason while Honneth challenges what he sees as the precedence Gadamer gives to the immediate experience of tradition over reflection on it in the light of generalized norms.
Zammito: The discipline of history has had to struggle from the outset with the philosophical challenge to its status as a “science.” Hermeneutic historicism has been the most plausible basis for a consistent response to this challenge. In this chapter I trace the disciplinary constitution of history via hermeneutic historicism in the works of Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Gustav Droysen, and Wilhelm Dilthey. One of my objectives is to displace a conception of the rise of the discipline identified too closely with Leopold von Ranke, and instead to situate Droysen as the key theoretical progenitor of modern historical self-understanding and practice.
Starting from comments on the biblical texts as the “texts to be read” in biblical hermeneutics, the chapter addresses the encounter between Enlightenment thought and the theological tradition in order to explain three major hermeneutical challenges: first, the biblical narratives were no longer regarded as the key to the history of humankind, but as witnesses to particular religious cultures across many centuries in antiquity. Second, the biblical texts came to be contrasted with the philosophical concept of a natural religion which in turn included the idea of a natural law, i.e., a universalist concept of ethics. Third, the role of the reader in the hermeneutical process was redefined through an orientation toward the experience of the “inner truth” of scriptural texts rather than a reliance on formal demonstrations of ecclesiastical truth claims. Against the background of pre-Enlightenment hermeneutical models in which the “circumstances” of the origin of the texts as well as the question of the thematic “centre” and relevance of individual biblical texts had already been addressed, the philosophical claims raised by Immanuel Kant are brought into focus.