Abstract
Doctrines of methods of humanistic disciplines and the problem of the development of methodologies for the human sciences; the canons of hermeneutics: a critical re-examination; an epistemological analysis of the first and the second canon; the application of the first and the second canon to the interpretation of fixed life expressions; and the application of a modified version of the first canon to historical reconstructions.
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- 1.
Hermeneutics or the art of grammar was the name for a doctrine of methods in Classical Antiquity, in the middle Ages, and in the tradition of the humanists. But the name was also had been used later for the methodology of philological-historical research in the nineteenth century. cf. Seebohm 2004, §2.
- 2.
Sextus Empiricus 1949, in the title Against the Professors, the “professors” are the philologists.
- 3.
- 4.
Schleiermacher 1959, 116f.
- 5.
Dilthey GS 7, 217f; 243f; SW 3, 237f; 262f.
- 6.
Heidegger 1977, §32.
- 7.
There are aspects of cultures in past historical periods that have been neglected in the literature of these periods, because they belong to the realm of the elementary and higher understanding of illiterate working classes or because they belong to the secret traditions of sophisticated arts in the guilds of craftsmen.
- 8.
The old technical term for the negative answer is “non liquet,” i.e., “there is not enough information.”
- 9.
However, there are sometimes also controversies between philologists and archaeologists, e.g., in the last decade the controversies about the origin of the Iliad and the location of Troy.
- 10.
For instance, the invention of windmills in the Middle Ages.
- 11.
See Sect. 7.2 below.
- 12.
The immediate forerunners are Hume, Kant, and Herschel. What was said about methods before, e.g., by Bacon or Locke, is ingenious but partially misleading.
- 13.
Boeckh 1966. Boeckh called his lectures (published only later 1886) Encyclopedia and Methodology of the Philological Sciences (Enczclopaedie und Methodenlehre der philologischen Wissenschaften).
- 14.
- 15.
According to Blass 1892, papyrology, palaeography, and archaeology are only auxiliary disciplines of philology; Dilthey corrected this classification. (cf. Seebohm 2004, §9, 66). According to what has been said before about the methods and methodologies it is tempting to assume that historical archaeology and philology are correlated disciplines that presuppose each other. Pre-historical archaeology shows, however, that archaeology has in addition its own methodological principles beyond this correlation.
- 16.
Betti 1967, §16, 216f.
- 17.
The objective/subjective distinction of Betti distinguishes between text and interpreter and not, like Boeckh’s between the objective and subjective conditions of a text.
- 18.
Schleiermacher 1959, p. 101: “Alles, was noch einer näheren Bestimmung bedarf in einer gegebenen Rede, darf nur aus dem Verfasser und seinem Publikum ursprünglischen Sprachgebiet bestimmt werden.”
- 19.
See Betti 1967, 220f with many references to Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics and other sources.
- 20.
Betti 1967, 222f.
- 21.
Hirsch 1967, ch. 1, “In Defence of the Author.”
- 22.
Hirsch 1967, 24f, 112.
- 23.
Cf. Seebohm 2004, 61ff.
- 24.
Christian theologians can be interested in objectively valid interpretations of the rabbinic literature, but they have to reject it in their own context. One can be interested in the literature of the Nazis, e.g., in Rosenberg’s Mythos des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, without being a Nazi.
- 25.
The German term “Zusammenhang” means a reciprocal system of interdependent elements.
- 26.
- 27.
Version (2) is, as mentioned, only meaningful for philology in the broader sense, i.e., for philological-historical research.
- 28.
“Stemma” is a term that was originally used to characterize the genetic relations of old manuscripts. A manuscript has been copied from one or more available other manuscripts, they depend in turn on manuscripts of an earlier generation, etc. For a more detailed account see Seebohm 2004, §35
- 29.
This context has been called “efficient history,” Efficient history requires philological-historical text interpretations that reach beyond the limits of philology in the narrower sense.
- 30.
For the sake of brevity, the term “dictionary” will be used as shorthand for “thesaurus of…” in the following sections.
- 31.
According to Boeckh, the methodical guidelines of interpretations on the lower level are determined by the objective conditions of a text. Methodical guidelines for the interpretation on the higher level of hermeneutics refer to the subjective conditions of a text; see Boeckh 1966, 81f; 124f; 140f; (1968, 49f.; 89f; 108f.). The subjective and objective conditions are both conditions of the text. Betti’s distinction between subjective and objective conditions refers to the canons of hermeneutics.
- 32.
Given early phases of the development of written literary traditions in different languages with similar structures, comparative research is able to reconstruct the linguistic context of the common root language of such languages, e.g., the Indo-European languages.
- 33.
A trivial example: It is natural for a naïve interpreter of the twentieth century to understand the sentence “The lord of the lowlands was a gay person” in a novel of the nineteenth century as “The lord was a homosexual.” But what was really meant according to the meaning of the word in the genetic horizon of the novel is “The lord was a person in good spirits.”
- 34.
Hirsch 1967, ch. 1.
- 35.
- 36.
Cf Heidegger 1977, §32 which explicitly says that the hermeneutics of being has nothing in common with hermeneutics as a method.
- 37.
The following analyses presuppose the material of Part I, Sect. 2.2.
References
Betti, E. 1967. Allgemeine Auslegungslehre als Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr.
Blass, F. 1892. Hermeneutik und Kritik, Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaften. München: C. H. Beck.
Boeckh, A. 1966. Enzyclopaedie und Methodenlehre der philologischen Wissenschaften, ed. E. Bratuscheck. Leipzig, 1886; rpt. Stuttgart: Teubner.
Boeckh, A. 1968. On Interpretation and Criticism. Trans. J.P. Pritchard. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
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Gadamer, H.G. 1965. Wahrheit und Methode, 2nd ed. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr.
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Hirsch, E.D. 1967. Validity in interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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Seebohm, T. 2004. Hermeneutics: Method and methodology. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Sextus Empiricus. 1949. Against the Professors works, vol. 4, ed. R.G. Bury. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Seebohm, T.M. (2015). History as a Science of Interpretation. In: History as a Science and the System of the Sciences. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 77. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8_5
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