Hermeneutics
HERMENEUTICS. The term hermeneutics is derived from the Greek verb hermēneuein ("to interpret") and refers to the intellectual discipline concerned with the nature and presuppositions of the interpretation of human expressions.
Introduction
The Greek term has etymological associations with the name of the Greek god Hermes, the messenger of the gods and the deity of boundaries. Some have seen this association as reflecting the inherently triadic structure of the act of interpretation: (1) a sign, message, or text from some source requires (2) a mediator or interpreter (Hermes) to (3) convey it to some audience. So considered, this deceptively simple triadic structure implicitly contains the major conceptual issues with which hermeneutics deals: (1) the nature of a text; (2) what it means to understand a text; and (3) how understanding and interpretation are determined by the presuppositions and beliefs (the horizon) of the audience to which the text is being interpreted. Serious reflection on any of these three issues reveals why interpretation is itself a philosophical issue and a subject of interpretation.
Since interpretation is fundamental to all the intellectual disciplines—to the natural sciences as well as the humanities—one might have expected hermeneutics to have arisen earlier in Western culture than it did.
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