ABSTRACT
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics heralds a rehabilitation of tradition, a notion which has made it possible to confer new meaning to various devalued concepts in modern philosophy such as authority and prejudice. Paul Ricoeur’s rejoinder appears in the seminal scholarly writings he has dedicated to the hermeneutics of the text rather than in the writings he has expressly devoted to law. The formalization of the ‘critical instance’ is achieved through the dialectic explanation/understanding that calls for two ‘levels’ of scrutiny. The first introduces a procedure for validation of the initial guesses made on the basis of an early overall grasp of the text as a singular work. The second stems from the structure of the text and operates by retrieving possible worlds from its codified nucleus. Ricoeur’s approach to legal interpretation is entirely driven by his works on the hermeneutics of text, and it is revealed through three works that he specifically devoted to legal hermeneutics.
