Abstract

A new hermeneutical theory is needed that will avoid both the "analytical" fixation on the epistemic functions of the historian and the "dialectical" tendency to "ontologize" interpretation to the point where questions of truth in the sense of fidelity to the past become increasingly marginal. The prospects for such a theory are not particularly good. We do not have what would be required to reconcile these ways of thinking about interpretation. That would be a new and more powerful way of conceiving the unity of theoretical and practical reason based on a much deeper understanding of what it is to be hurnan. But the antihumanistic temper of much contemporary thought makes a revival of constructive philosophical inin that question unlikely.