ABSTRACT
It is disconcerting that occasionally hermeneutics is sometimes perceived as something of an intellectual upstart, essentially an expression or product of a postmodern sensibility. As Mark Freeman protests, ‘hermeneutics ought not to be considered the unscientific, relativistic, scepticism-ridden fantasy land it is sometimes assumed to be, by supporters and detractors alike’.1 In fact, of course, hermeneutics is a venerable branch of enquiry with roots reaching back to an tiquity, to the Greek verb hermeneuein, ‘to interpret’, and to the figure of Hermes, the messenger-god, pursuing his unending task of ‘transmuting what is beyond human understanding into a form that human intelligence can grasp’, in order to bring this or that ‘thing or situation from unintelligibility to understanding’.2 Hermeneutics is, in this way, ‘practically as old as our culture’.3
