Historical Hermeneutics

Historical hermeneutics is the theory and practice of interpreting historical texts in order to recover their meaning. Growing from the older art of scriptural and legal exegesis, it was generalized by Friedrich Schleiermacher into a universal method of understanding, deepened by Wilhelm Dilthey into the foundation of the human sciences, and given its modern philosophical form by Hans-Georg Gadamer. The method confronts a basic problem: a text from the past was written in a language, genre, and worldview not our own, for an audience whose assumptions we do not share. To understand it, the interpreter must reconstruct what its words meant to its author and first readers, moving in a circle between the meaning of the parts and the sense of the whole. Gadamer added a reflexive turn, insisting that interpreters cannot escape their own historical position but must bring it into a fusion of horizons with the text. Hermeneutics thus supplies the interpretive depth that source criticism, concerned with authenticity and reliability, leaves open.