Abstract
The history of philosophy is first of all a matter of interpreting texts. But texts, as we know, can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Whoever studies or teaches or writes the history of philosophy uses some interpretive mode, and a first philosophic problem for the history of philosophy is to determine the number and nature of interpretive modes. Since we like to call the art of interpretation hermeneutics, we may call this the problem of hermeneutic modes. This is the problem that we will here address.
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Liddell, Scott, and Jones, for example, in their Greek-English Lexicon (9th ed.) list as the first meaning of “hermêneia” “interpretation, explanation.” Again, the title of Aristotle’s Peri hermeneias was translated into Latin as De Interpretatione, and from thence into English as On Interpretation. And Kenneth Telford in his most literal and exact translation of the Poetics translates “hermeneia” in the definition of diction by “interpretation” (Kenneth A. Telford, Aristotle’s Poetics: Translation and Analysis (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1961), p.14).
Such an inquiry into “hermeneia” and its cognates has in fact been suggested by Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern U.P. 1969).
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War ii. 60.
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 398.
Xenophon, Memorabilia i. 2. 52.
Ibid. iv. 3. 11–12.
Aristotle, Topics vi. 1. 139b 12–18.
On Sophistical Refutations 5. 166b 10–19.
On the Soul ii. 8. 421M8–23. See also On Respiration 11. 476a19.
On the Parts of Animals ii. 17. 660a35.
Poetics, 6. 1449b34, 1450bl2.
Xenophon, Anabasis i. 2. 16–18, trans. J.S. Watson.
Ibid. ii. 3. 17–18. See also i. 8. 12; ii. 5.35; iv. 2. 18; iv. 4. 5; iv. 5. 10, 34; v. 4. 4; vii. 2.19; vii. 6. 8. 43.
Philyllius, Fr. 11 in J. M. Edmonds, The Fragments of Attic Comedy, (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1957), I.906.
Xenophon, Cyropaedia i.6.2, trans. J.S. Watson.
Oeconomicus ii. 23–25.
Gorgias B.11a.6–7.
Euripides, Andromache 46.
Electro 333–335.
Polyidus Fr. 1
Iphigeneia in Tauris 1303.
Herakles 1134–1135.
Andromeda Fr.25.
The Phoenissae 460–472.
Diogenes of Apollonia Fr. 1
Antiphon, Tetralogies ii.2.1.
Hippocrates, The Sacred Disease 17, trans. W.H.S. Jones.
Ibid. 19.
Ibid. 20. See also Epidemics v.74.
Herodotus, Persian War i.86, trans. G. Rawlinson.
Ibid. i. 33.
Ibid. ii.125. Herodotus also records the transmission of the knowledge of Greek from the Greeks in Egypt to Egyptian children put in their care, and from them to the whole class of interpreters, one of seven classes of the Egyptians. (Ibid. 154, 164.)
Ibid. iii. 38. There are further references to interpreters at iii. 140, where the interpreter functions to mark the change in the relative status of Darius and Syloson since their first meeting, when they communicated without an interpreter, and at iv. 24, where the seven interpreters mark the limits of the communication of meaning to the outer Barbarians.
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© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Watson, W. (1989). Hermeneutic Modes, Ancient and Modern. In: Lavine, T.Z., Tejera, V. (eds) History and Anti-History in Philosophy. Nijhoff International Philosophy Series, vol 34. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2466-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2466-6_5
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