ABSTRACT
We may be tempted by the hermeneutical turn because it shares, with our argument, the attack on foundationalism. It was because of the claims for reason as the adjudicator of epistemic practices that epistemology, in the eighteenth century, enjoyed the status of a foundational discipline. By the nineteenth century, philosophy had become a substitute for religion for man: 'It was the area of culture where one touched bottom, where one found the vocabulary and the convictions which permitted one to explain and justify one's activity as an intellectual, and thus to discover the significance of one's life'. There is the possibility of the enquirer becoming a new being. It appears that as with philosophy in the nineteenth century, hermeneutics in the twentieth century is offered as a substitute for religion. 'God is love' is not a description of God which may be true or false, but a grammatical rule for one use, albeit a primary one, of the word 'God'.
