ABSTRACT
In the course of modern western philosophy, hermeneutics can be considered as a main topic in contemporary fundamental ontology. The Greek priests, practising their hermeneuticè technè to explain the oracles or the signs in the sky, were by no means the first exponents of this proficiency. This chapter considers Alfred North Whitehead's metaphysics as a hermeneutical ontology: to be actual means to be an interpretative/expressive act. According to Whitehead, a metaphysical account of nature implies a hermeneutical interpretation of natural phenomena; the creative advance is the outcome of processes or strategies in which this aim for intensity is expressed. For Whitehead 'it must be one of the motives of a complete cosmology to construct a system of ideas, which brings the aesthetic, moral, and religious interests into relation with those concepts of the world which have their origin in natural science'.
