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School · 1900 CE–2005 CE

Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is theory of interpretation that came to address language, historical understanding, texts, action, and self-understanding.

Shared questions

  • How can interpretation reach understanding across historical, linguistic, and cultural distance?

Internal disagreements

  • Whether interpretation recovers authorial intention, exposes hidden conditions, or opens a dialogical encounter with a text and tradition.

Key texts

  • Truth and Method · 1960 — Gadamer's account of understanding as a fusion of horizons, written against method as the guarantor of truth.
  • Time and Narrative · 1983–1985 — Ricoeur's three volumes on how narrative configures lived time.