Dimensions of the hermeneutic circle

Hermeneutics, or the theory of interpretation, is an extremely important branch of epistemology that has, in the past twenty years, been receiving an increasing amount of attention. There is now a fairly extensive body of rather daunting literature in the field, most of it originating in the European phenomenological tradition. Dimensions of the Hermeneutic Circle is intended to give readers who are philosophically sophisticated but not yet conversant with hermeneutics a comprehensive overview of the history and concerns of the discipline. One of the ways in which the book addresses the problem of making the rather difficult primary literature in this field accessible to the general reader is by focusing on the structure of the hermeneutic circle, which serves as a strong unifying thread running through the narrative of the history of hermeneutics and ties together many seemingly unrelated issues. This form shows how the development of hermeneutics in the past two centuries coincided with a gradual increase in our appreciation of the subtleties and many variations of the hermeneutic circle. It also makes explicit some of the more important ways in which the hermeneutic circle can be seen to function in the practices of the natural sciences, thus bridging the methodological gap between the Geisteswissenschaften (human studies) and the natural sciences. This book is illustrated with forty diagrams representing the variations of the hermeneutic circle, further reinforcing the clarity of exposition. It will therefore be appropriate as core text for graduate or senior courses on hermeneutics or literary theory, and as supplementary text for courses in the philosophy of science, historiography, and aesthetics.