ABSTRACT
The majority of the issues that emerge in this study belong to the field of contemporary philosophy commonly designated hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is a systematic discipline concerned with unearthing the principles regulating all forms of interpretation. The changes wrought by Descartes and spun out more comprehensively by Kant did indeed question the objectivity of tradition. But they did not do so on the individualistic basis of 'subjectivity' or with the intention of subverting the concept of authority as such. Prior to Heidegger's correction, this inversion of truth and meaning under a universal perspective created a fundamental divide between the processes of what the Dilthey had called explanation and understanding within the ostensibly unified method of general hermeneutics. Gadamer and Ricoeur both attempt to surmount this aporia and establish a means of making meaningful truth-claims or, conversely, of recovering the true meaning.
