Work to be Done

This plenary address to the 2013 annual meeting of the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics is intended to shift the discussion beyond the study of individual figures like Gadamer and Ricoeur. Beyond the distinction between ontological and epistemological approaches to hermeneutics, and even that between regional and general hermeneutics, it seeks to pose three areas needing further investigation. At the level of presuppositions and assumptions, more needs to be said about how we can say "we understand"; at the level of practice, there is the question of how one evaluates not just competing interpretations but any interpretation; and at a more basic level constitutive of hermeneutic philosophy, the question of reflexivity-that I/we understand that I/we understand-remains to be explored.