Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction

This book is more about the hermeneutic philosophy developed in continental Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries, a philosophy that attempts to understand understanding. This book is less about the historical practice and development of hermeneutics before the 19th century. Hermeneutics is about interpretation, the attempt to determine meaning in order to understand. The key insight of the hermeneutic philosophy is that meaning is contextual. We understand by intergrating parts or facts into a more cohesive, meaningful whole or context. The second and third chapters of the book give a historical overview of the development of the hermeneutics philosophy. The second shows how ideas from Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Husserl, and Heidegger each contributed. The third chapter is all about Gadamer bringing these ideas together and giving the definitive statement to the hermeneutic philosophy in his 1960 book "Truth and Method." Having explained the hermeneutic philosophy historically, the last four chapters of the book look at literature, theology, law, and science in the light of this philosophy. The author tries to show that looking at texts or data in all four areas is inherently hermeneutical. These chapters are good and insightful, but could have all used more historical context, particularly on developments prior to 1800. The interpretation of sacred and legal texts, the origins of hermeneutics as an activity or method, has a rich history which is not even hinted at here. With regard to the interpretation of sacred texts for example, there is no mention of Philo of Alexandria or Spinoza. There is little discussion of hermeneutics as a concrete method, nor of its history prior to the 1800s, prior to the hermeneutic philosophy. There is also no mention of analogues between ideas in the hermeneutic philosophy and cognitive science. For example, the hermeneutic circle could be seen as something akin to the "bottom-up" and "top down" processes talked about in cognitive psychology. However, the book does provide a well-written, excellent introduction to hermeneutics as a philosophy, and for that I'd recommend it!!

Very useful, this is the second time I purchased a book in this series ( A very short introduction). This book is useful to get a topical survey of hermeneutics, The Zimmermann makes import point after point, no wasted space. These kind of books are useful for creating innovation because one can quickly survey a topic and consider its usefulness in one's own research. If there is a connection then the references and further reading section directs you toward the depths. Personally. I had heard of hermeneutics but wasn't so familiar. This turned out to be the thing I was looking for. So much so that I believe it should be taught at the 6th to 8th standard of education. Every human should learn the philosophy and methods of interpretation and meaning. Unfortunately Hermeneutics classes only show up in College and Universities. Looking back it would have been nice in those teenage years to understand why I am studying what I am studying.

A very clear look at a difficult subject. The author seems well acquainted with the prominent thinkers on the subject, but has his own take on hermeneutics. If the other books in this series are as good, I'll be ordering more of them.

Great introduction and summary.

This is an informative, clear, and concise summary of hermeneutics. Moreover, I would also recommend it as the best introduction to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, who is so important to the subject that he might as well be a subtitle to the book. I wish there had been a chapter on psychology (Freud's most famous book is called The Interpretation of Dreams, after all), but considering the scope of a Very Short Introduction I still think this is worth five stars. (I read the kindle edition.)

I really like this book. It gives you all the information without an author trying to make his book overly worded. I’m looking forward to reading more books from this book series.

This book is well-written and achieves considerable breadth in covering various hermeneutic thinkers (chief among them, Gadamer and Ricouer) and disiciplinary applications (law, theology, science, and the humanities). I bought this book because I was intrigued by and sympathetic to the basic concept of hermeneutics as I understood it prior to reading. This prior understanding of mine was something along the lines of: a literary-oriented perspective that originated from and has gotten its most traction in the humanities and that seeks to critique naive objectivist views of knowledge. The book's fundamental--and in my view, fatal--weakness is a high degree of fuzziness as to just what hermeneutics is--or, rather, what it is not. We are told that hermeneutics involves the human act of interpretation, which entails the derivation of meanings or interpretations from a process of integrating parts into meaningful wholes. We are also informed of various hermeneutic sensibilities, such as: a valuing of tradition; an emphasis on knowledge and meaning as inherently personal and practical (application-oriented); a conversational perspective on knowledge generation wherein meaning is achieved in community and dialogue (including our engagement with long-deceased authors); and, perhaps most fundamentally, a recognition that facts always require interpretation and are never divorced from values or broader linguistic "webs" of assumptions and concepts. In sketching these emphases, Zimmerman's main foils seem to be naive rationalism and empiricism in their various manifestations (e.g., logical positivism, scientism, common sense realism). Basically, like other broadly "post-modern" intellectual movements, contemporary hermeneutics rejects the Enlightenment idea that there are universally valid, orderly ways to produce indubitable knowledge and meaning; or at the very least, it rejects the idea that this is how science, the law, or history actually work in practice. All well and good, but there are two problems with this. First, in the year 2015, these observations seem fairly obvious, possibly even quaint, as many of these basic "hermeneutic" insights seem to be pretty well-absorbed into the cultural consciousness. Outside of rigid fundamentalists (scientific, atheistic, and religious), most progressive, college-educated folks would embrace these ideas as non-controversial. They have become absorbed into our contemporary "common sense." As such, I couldn't help reading this with a sense of, "That's it? That's hermeneutics?" Second, and related, the book does little to sketch out what hermeneutics is *not*. Hermeneutics is presented as either the act of interpretation (or the study of the conditions for the act of interpretation), where interpretation is the organization of pieces of information into meaningful wholes. With such a broad and elastic definition of hermeneutics, it becomes very difficult to view hermeneutics as a cohesive or substantial intellectual enterprise. It is more a set of sensibilities that people may embrace to greater or lesser extent. It ends up feeling airy, insubstantial. Since all human endeavor entails interpretation, hermeneutics would seem to concern everything, but then that leaves us awash in vague abstractions--ironic given hermeneutic thinkers' emphasis on practical application of knowledge. Finally, one of the few sustained efforts to apply hermeneutic thinking comes in the chapter about legal interpretation. In that chapter, Zimmermann attempts to illustrate how hermeneutic principles would lead one to reject capital punishment as unconstitutional despite the fact that an internally consistent reading of the constitution clearly suggests that the founding fathers assumed that the application of capital punishment was legal and normative (Zimmermann acknowledges this point). Citing legal theorists he identifies as hermeneutic (in spirit if not in self-identification), Zimmermann notes how hermeneutic principles of integration and dialogue among past literature (the constitution), immediate problems (practical application to legal decision-making), and contemporary perspectives (evolving thoughts on the cruelty of the death penalty) might lead one to conclude that the death penalty is no longer constitutional even if it was assumed and implicitly endorsed in the constitution. Zimmermann's main justification for this conclusion is that contemporary society's evolving views of human rights, dignity, and cruelty require us to appeal to a broader constitutional principle of dignity and respect for human life to overturn or re-interpret the founding fathers' own view, which in hindsight reflects a contradiction in their thinking or failure to follow their core constitutional principles to their logical implications. In essence, Zimmermann is here appealing to Gadamer's "fusion of horizons" idea in which the perspectives of the past (here, the Constitution and its authors and their wider historical context) must be brought into dialogue with the perspectives and practical problems of the present (the courts, the death penalty issue, and contemporary American society c. 2015). The problem with this is, not only did the Constitution / founding fathers seem to be comfortable that the death penalty was Constitutional, but it is also still the case that a majority of Americans (Zimmermann is focusing primarily on the American legal system) support the death penalty. So, how is Zimmermann able to cite judicial decisions to reject (not implement) the death penalty as reflecting a paragon of hermeneutic skill and sensitivity. Rather than reflecting a fusion of horizons, it seems like the arbitrary nullification of both the law (Consitutional and other statutes) and public opinion in favor of the legal theorist's own moral/ethical values--basically, appeal to hermeneutics as a cover for elitist activism. My point is not to go on a political diatribe about the judiciary in general or the death penalty in particular: I am at best ambivalent about the death penalty and, on balance, I would support its abolition. The point is that this application reveals a certain arbitrary, under-determined quality to hermeneutic thinking. Just as hermeneutics is quite vague and elastic in theory (as far as what is and is not "hermeneutic" thinking), it appears to be quite pliable, unpredictable, and borderline arbitrary in its practical application. In other words, it is not at all clear how one moves from the general observation that hermeneutics entails dialogue and contextualization to an actual practical model of how to do good applied hermeneutics (exegesis, application)--that is, how to arbitrate among more and less sound interpretations and applications. In summary, hermeneutics is both vague and muddled conceptually and vague and muddled in its application. I don't blame Zimmermann for this, as I suspect that he is a thoughtful and accurate expositor of what is simply a general label for a diverse and diffuse federation of thinkers with some shared sensibilities. Whatever the merits of each individual thinker (whose ideas are necessarily presented in a flattened "Cliff's Notes" fashion here), this book leaves me unconvinced that there is much value in speaking of "hermeneutics" itself at the high level of abstraction employed in this book.

After finishing a few books on hermeneutics I believe this one is THE best introduction to hermeneutics. This will provide a useful starting point for anyone who wants to know about the subject.