The Best Hermeneutics Philosophy Books 2025

1. Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present [Paperback - Used]

CONDITION - USED - Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels or previous owner inscriptions. Accessories such as CD, codes, toys, may not be included. Essays discuss reason and understanding, interpretation, language, meaning, the human sciences, social sciences, and general hermeneutic theory.

Hermeneutics Reader : Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present, Used [Paperback]

2. Hermeneutics, Citizenship, and the Public Sphere, Used [Paperback]

This book sheds new light on the question of democratic politics by proposing a hermeneutic conception of citizenship and the public sphere. At the same time, it presents a critique of the postmodern arguments advanced by Richard Rorty, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard. Questioning a dominant interpretation that sees Gadamer's hermeneutics as the expression of a conservative project, Alejandro argues that it includes an important element of critique that could challenge dominant structures and practices.

Hermeneutics, Citizenship, and the Public Sphere, Used [Paperback]

3. Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics I (Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers), Used [Paperback]

This collection brings together twenty-two essays by Paul Ricoeur under the topics of structuralism, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and religion. In dramatic conciseness, the essays illuminate the work of one of the leading philosophers of the day. Those interested in Ricoeur's development of the philosophy of language will find rich and suggestive reading. But the diversity of essays also speaks beyond the confines of philosophy to linguists, theologians, psychologists, and psychoanalysts.

Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics I (Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers), Used [Paperback]

4. Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire [Paperback - Used]

CONDITION - USED - Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels or previous owner inscriptions. Accessories such as CD, codes, toys, may not be included. A distinguished anthropologist and a creative force behind postmodern writing in his field, Vincent Crapanzano here focuses his considerable critical powers upon his own culture. In essays that question how the human sciences, particularly anthropology and psychoanalysis, articulate their fields of study, Crapanzano addresses nothing less than the enormous problem of defining the self in both its individual and collective projections. Treating subjects as diverse as Roman carnivals and Balinese cockfights, circumcision, dreaming, and spirit possession in Morocco, transference in psychoanalysis, self-characterization in teenage girls' gossip, Alice in Wonderland , and Jane Austen's Emma , dialogue models in hermeneutics, and semantic vertigo in Hamlet's Elsinore, these essays look critically at the inner workings of interpretation in human sciences and literary study. In modern Western culture's attempts to interpret and communicate the nature of other cultures, Crapanzano finds a crippling crisis in representation. He shows how the quest for knowledge of "exotic" and "primitive" people is often confused with an unexamined need for self-definition, and he sets forth the resulting interpretive paradoxes, particularly the suppression of any awareness of the play of power and desire in such an approach. What is missing from contemporary theories of interpretation is, in Crapanzano's account, a crucial understanding of the role context plays in any act of communication or its representation--in interpretation itself.

Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire, Used [Paperback]

5. Contemporary Hermeneutics, Used [Paperback]

This work is both an introduction to, and a reader in, contemporary hermeneutics. Included are papers by Betti, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Apel and Habermas.

Contemporary Hermeneutics, Used [Paperback]

6. The Nature of Psychological Explanation, Used [Hardcover]

In exploring the nature of psychological explanation, this book looks at how psychologists theorize about the human ability to calculate, to speak a language and the like. It shows how good theorizing explains or tries to explain such abilities as perception and cognition. It recasts the familiar explanations of "intelligence" and "cognitive capacity" as put forward by philosophers such as Fodor, Dennett, and others in terms of a theory of explanation that makes established doctrine more intelligible to professionals and their students. In particular, the book shows that vestigial adherence to the positivists' D-N model has distorted the view of philosophers of science about what psychologists (and biologists) do and has masked the real nature of explanation. Major sections in the book cover Analysis and Subsumption; Functional Analysis; Understanding Cognitive Capacities; and Historical Reflections. A Bradford Book.

The Nature of Psychological Explanation, Used [Hardcover]

7. Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History : Applied Hermeneutics, Used [Hardcover]

In these essays, appearing for the first time in English, Gadamer addresses practical questions about recent politics in Europe, about education and university reform, and about the role of poetry in the modern world. This book also includes a series of interviews that the editors conducted in 1986. Gadamer elaborates on his experiences in education and politics, touching on the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the early Frankfurt School, Heidegger and the Nazis, university life in East Germany, and the prospects for Europe in the coming years. Hans-Georg Gadamer was probably Heidegger's leading interpreter in Germany, and in the 1950s and 1960s he became the world's leading exponent of hermeneutics. His hermeneutical theory explains how it is that ancient art and philosophy still speak to us today. His influential idea of the "fusion of horizons" also shows how it is that we understand what is remote form our own culture.

Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History : Applied Hermeneutics, Used [Hardcover]

8. Limits of Rightness [Paperback - Used]

CONDITION - USED - Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels or previous owner inscriptions. Accessories such as CD, codes, toys, may not be included. Do cultural artifacts admit of only one single admissible interpretation? Or do they admit of several admissible interpretations? If so, do such multiple interpretations arise only in connection with the material world? And what is the relation between such ideals of interpretation and the ontology of their objects? In this searching book Krausz considers the conditions under which singularism obtains (where one and only one interpretation is admissible), the conditions under which multiplism obtains (where more than one interpretation is admissible), and, finally the conditions under which neither singularism nor multiplism obtain, hence the "limits of rightness." When considering the relation between interpretive ideals and the ontology of interpreted objects, Krausz explores and develops varieties of realism, constructivism, and constructive realism. Finally, Krausz extends the notions of singularism and mutliplism to directional life paths and projects. In the course of his treatment Krausz considers such diverse examples as the paintings of Anselm Kiefer, Cristo's Wrapped Reichstag, Indian burial rites, Hindu and Buddhist soteriologies, as well as middle-sized objects and sub-atomic particles. And he considers contributions of such thinkers as John Searle, Nelson Goodman, Rom Harre, Bernard Harrison and Patricial Hanna, Fritz Wallner, Hilary Putnam, Chhanda Gupta, Joseph Margolis, David Norton, and Martha Nussbaum.

Limits of Rightness, Used [Paperback]

9. Hermeneutics Versus Science: Three German Views (Revisions) (English and German Edition) [Hardcover - Used]

CONDITION - USED - Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "From the library of" labels or previous owner inscriptions. Accessories such as CD, codes, toys, may not be included. Hermeneutics Versus Science: Three German Views (Revisions) (English and German Edition) by Gadamer, Hans-Georg; Specht, E. K.; Stegmuller, W.

Hermeneutics Versus Science: Three German Views (Revisions) (English and German Edition) [Hardcover - Used]

10. The Promise of Hermeneutics, Used [Paperback]

This work presents an engaging interdisciplinary study of the nature and scope of interpretation, one of the most important areas of inquiry in today's postmodern world. The three authors, all acknowledged experts in the field, bring the resources of the Bible, Christian tradition, and intellectual history to bear upon contemporary hermeneutical disputes.

The Promise of Hermeneutics, Used [Paperback]