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Vattimo, Gianni : BEYOND INTERPRETATION: THE MEANING OF HERMENEUTICS FOR PHILOSOPHY

Stanford University Press, 1997

ISBN 9780804729949

A crisp clean softcover, no markings throughout, NOT an ex-lib book: Hermeneutics has had a pervasive influence on contemporary philosophy, soci al and cultural theory, literary criticism, and aesthetics. It has become s o widespread an instrument that its very meaning threatens to dissolve into vague generalities, empty of significance and wedded to a shallow relativi sm. In this book one of Europe's foremost contemporary philosophers provide s hermeneutics with a fresh relevance and a substantive account of its phil osophical meaning for science, ethics, religion, and art. Vattimo argues for a reading of hermeneutics that radicalizes it according to what the author calls its "nihilistic vocation," a term referring to the interpretive character of truth and taken from Nietzsche's statement that there are, in the modern period, no facts, only interpretations. Modernity, for Vattimo, is conceived as the advent of nihilism, and the central quest ion of the book is to ask what it means to take this nihilistic vocation se riously. This involves not simply accepting the current status of hermeneut ics, but evaluating why it appears when, and where, it does. By way of a response to a number of questions only briefly treated in the text, as well as to broaden the author's argumentation on various points, there is an appendix containing two previously published essays, "The Truth of Hermeneutics" and "The Reconstruction of Rationality.", Near Fine

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