Three Faces of Hermeneutics

An Introduction to Current Theories of Understanding

Roy J. Howard

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780520371880
• eBook ISBN: 9780520335134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Hermenéutica filosófica

Three Faces of Hermeneutics introduces philosophical hermeneutics as a live response to the longstanding “two cultures” rift between sciences and humanities. Framed by the question of how purposes and intentions shape experience, reality, and knowledge, it pushes back on a mono-methodological ideal that treats scientific explanation as the only legitimate model. Against the presumption that neutrality and objectivity must minimize the individual, hermeneutics argues that in domains like history and literature, subjectivity isn’t a contaminant but part of the object of inquiry itself. Picking up where C. P. Snow’s debate left off, the author asks whether the humanities disclose ranges of truth that quantifying methods can’t reach—and, if so, what sort of rigor governs such “understanding.” The contemporary spark is Hans-Georg Gadamer’s *Truth and Method*, which reworks hermeneutics beyond a toolbox for deciphering difficult texts into a general account of understanding: meanings are lived before they are thought; human beings are already interpreters by virtue of their existence. That shift, indebted to phenomenology and Heidegger, recasts interpretation as constitutive of knowledge rather than merely ancillary to it.

The project maps three modern “faces” of hermeneutics, each rejecting positivist mono-methodology while avoiding psychologism. Chapter 1 tracks an analytic strand shaped by early and late Wittgenstein: understanding language shows why explanation cannot exhaust meaning, and why “subjective” input is inescapable without collapsing into mere inner states. Chapter 2 presents Jürgen Habermas’s evolved Marxism, which integrates critique, ideology analysis, and Freudian insights to expand what counts as rational inquiry. Chapter 3 returns to Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics, where understanding is historically effected and dialogical. The book deliberately brackets structuralism (Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Chomsky), viewing its transcendental grammars as sidelining the agent. It also argues—via Apel and von Wright—that anti-positivist analytic philosophy converges with Continental hermeneutics, hinting at a path to dismantle the analytic/Continental wall and to rehabilitate the humanities as knowledge-bearing, not ornamental.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Origins of the Problem
• Analytic Hermeneutics
• A Psychosocial Hermeneutics
• Ontological Hermeneutics
• Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography
• INDEX