Work · German Idealism & Its Heirs
Hermeneutics and Criticism
The art of understanding: grammatical and psychological interpretation.
Introduction
Schleiermacher lectured on hermeneutics from 1805 in Halle and later many times in Berlin, but never wrote a book on it. The volume “Hermeneutik und Kritik” was compiled by Friedrich Lücke after his death from his manuscripts and students’ notes and published in 1838. Schleiermacher’s step was to treat hermeneutics not as a set of rules for the Bible, law or classical texts, but as a general art of understanding any speech. Interpretation moves between the parts and the whole, and between language and the author’s individual style. Later editions of his manuscripts (Heinz Kimmerle, 1959; Manfred Frank, 1977) changed the view of the text; Dilthey and Gadamer built on it.
Connections
Taken up in
- Introduction to the Human Sciences1883 · Wilhelm Dilthey
Criticized in
- Truth and Method1960 · Hans-Georg Gadamer
More works by Friedrich Schleiermacher
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