ABSTRACT
Along with Heidegger and the philosopher of religion Paul Ricoeur, Gadamer is one of the most important twentieth-century scholars of hermeneutics, the science and art of interpretation, a field of study that has its ancient beginnings in Jewish and Christian scriptural studies. In Gadamer’s work hermeneutics is transformed from the science of interpretation to the science of understanding. As such, it replaces metaphysics and epistemology as lords of the human sciences, addressing how humans find meaning and understand themselves and the world.
