ABSTRACT
Hermeneutics entails critical reflection on the basis, nature and goals of reading, interpreting and understanding communicative acts and processes. This characteristically concerns the understanding of texts, especially biblical or literary texts or those of another era or culture. In biblical studies the significance of Aristotle's work regained recognition only with the advent of narrative theory and reader-response criticism in biblical hermeneutics around the later 1970s. Rudolf Bultmann has achieved an enormous influence in biblical studies, and, like Emilio Betti, has engaged in dialogue with Wilhelm Dilthey and with Martin Heidegger. The decisive foundation of theoretical hermeneutics as a modern discipline occurred with the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher over the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. Friedrich Schleiermacher established hermeneutics as a modern discipline in its own right. Schleiermacher's intellectual successor in hermeneutics was Dilthey. Dilthey's hermeneutics contain weaknesses as well as certain strengths, as indeed remains the case also with Schleiermacher.
