History of Reception and Continued Validity. Understanding, Interpreting and the Goal of Acceptable Contextual Meaning

Abstract

This article analyses the relationship between historicity and the validity of traditions based on a critical comparison of the antithetical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method and Vittorio Hösle’s Kritik der verstehenden Vernunft, whose one-sidedness is to be balanced by a proposal of its own, which is presented in the last part. Based on a distinction between the mental operations of understanding and interpreting, an extended concept of interpretation for the humanities is presented and defended.