ABSTRACT
Hermeneutics - the word is derived from the name of the god Hermes, bearer of messages is the study of interpretation. While present-day scholars trace its roots back to very old traditions such as the Jewish tradition of Midrash and medieval Christian approaches to the Bible. It is generally agreed that the modern discipline of hermeneutics was founded in the eighteenth century, primarily by German scholars. It is not surprising that the attention of the early Romantics was drawn to issues of interpretation. Given their involvement with art and literature from ancient Greece, Europe, and India, it was inevitable that they would confront questions about how to understand works from other times and places. Just as hermeneutics and criticism depend on one another, Schleiermacher discovers that the two aspects of hermeneutics are also interdependent. Since the grammatical meaning of an utterance must be determined through knowledge of the state of the language at the place and time of the author.
