On Understanding and Interpretation: The Issues and Perspectives of Contemporary Hermeneutics

The Twentieth century was deeply influenced from philosophical hermeneutics’ theoretical-practical and reflective developments. It introduced a so large range of problematisations, contents and perspectives, and in a so vast referential and implicational (inter-)disciplinary scale, to enter into the real orbit of a philosophical koinè, not of a decennary or few decennaries (Vattimo), but of a century and more. It expresses the productivity, significance and heuristic strength of a research and thought that hits different scientific domains, particularly (but not exclusively) the human and social sciences: from psychology to sociology, from psychoanalysis to literature, from semiotic to biblical exegesis, from anthropology to linguistics, from rhetoric to narratology, from history to law, from political theory to religion etc. This is an itinerary as vast and fecund as non linear and problematic, and even conflictual.