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The advent of modern hermeneutics is inextricably bound up with German romanticism. This chapter charts the emergence of modern hermeneutics by identifying and detailing philosophically three phases of its development in romanticism. First, there is discussion of the hermeneutics of the Jena circle of romantics, where focus falls on Friedrich Schlegel – in particular his account of philosophical irony, fragmentary philosophical expression, and the absolute. The treatment connects these central philosophical conceptions to Schlegel’s philosophy of language and historiography. Interpretative understanding is a general mode of experience for Schlegel, significantly broadening the scope of hermeneutics from its home base in textual exegesis. In the second phase, romanticism provides hermeneutics with its earliest modern systematic form. Here the narrative turns to Schleiermacher’s systematization of hermeneutics – to hermeneutical theory correctly so-called – as contained in his Berlin lectures. Last, hermeneutical theory is extended scientifically by the work in the philosophy of language and comparative linguistics of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Taken together, these three phases of the interaction of hermeneutics and German romanticism constitute the core European understanding of hermeneutics prior to its reconceptualization in phenomenology.
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.
This chapter argues that, contrary appearances notwithstanding, France has made important contributions to the development of hermeneutics. The chapter focuses on the two centuries of which this is most true: the eighteenth and the twentieth. The chapter argues that French thought in the eighteenth century contributed one of the two main underpinnings of German hermeneutics: a recognition of anti-universalism that was subsequently adopted by Herder and his successors. The chapter then argues that in the twentieth century a whole series of French thinkers made further significant contributions to hermeneutics (albeit while usually avoiding the word), in particular Sartre, Ricoeur, Derrida, Barthes, Todorov, and Kristeva. Barthes’s contribution of a structuralist dimension to hermeneutics and his expansion of the hermeneutics of texts and discourse into a broader semiology are especially emphasized.
This chapter introduces non-Western perspectives on hermeneutics. The reception of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer across the globe is a particularly striking case of the transcultural transfer of ideas. Over the twentieth century, philosophers from the Arab and Persian world, India, China, and Japan, have engaged with Heidegger’s account of understanding and Gadamer’s theory of hermeneutic experience and effective history. This reception has often taken place against the backdrop of the philosophers’ own intellectual traditions and interpretative practices. In addition to introducing several different perspectives, with special emphasis on China, this contribution discusses the advantages of a truly global perspective on hermeneutics.