ABSTRACT
Human relationships and creative productions are based on shared meanings, and it became imperative to develop principles of meanings and intentions as distinct from the cause and effect "bodies in motion" of the natural sciences. The Romantic search for human universals became the art and science of philosophical hermeneutics. Philosophical hermeneutics as a discipline congealed from other areas of study such as theology, law, history, literature, and philology, the study of language. For instance, biblical interpretation was mostly based on the telos of the advent of Christ as the criterion for understanding and resolving problematic within Old and New Testament texts. Hermeneutics achieved the status of an academic discipline during the late Enlightenment era and the onset of romanticism. Johann Gottfried von Herder challenged the "folk psychology" belief that people understand one another "naturally" through their common humanity. Sigmund Freud questioned this naive assumption by looking for meanings beyond the awareness of the conscious ego.
