| This dissertation responds to the demand facing philosophical hermeneutics at a time when interpretation has become more of a general methodology than a philosophical responsibility: how can hermeneutics, as a philosophical theory, justify its own validity? The answer to this question is inspired by Gianni Vattimo's recognition of hermeneutics' development into a koiné of post-modern intellectualism. In Beyond Interpretation, Vattimo claims that "The truth is rather that hermeneutics can defend its theoretical validity only to the precise degree that the interpretative reconstruction of history is a rational activity—in which, that is, one can argue, and not only intuit, fühlen, einfühlen etc." I argue that the possibility of such a defense rests in the inheritance of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy, and in particular, in the philosophical method of transcendental deduction. Deduction, as it is performed in Kantian philosophy, attempts to justify the use of concepts employed to think those objects of philosophy that cannot be made immediately present to thought. In the first division of the dissertation I argue that the theoretical origins of a defense for philosophical hermeneutics can be found within Kant's critical philosophy. In the second division of the dissertation I argue that Heidegger, primarily in his works from the 1920's, takes up the helm of Kantian critique through an "ontologization" of that project. The result is a "deduction" at the root of the hermeneutics of Dasein. In the third and final division of the dissertation, I divert from the traditional hermeneutic lineage (one that might lead to Gadamer or Ricoeur) and engage Truth and Interpretation, the central work of the master of Italian hermeneutics, Luigi Pareyson (1918-1992). There I argue that Pareyson's defense of philosophy not only brings philosophical hermeneutics back into the realm of metaphysics as a critical philosophy, but also into a conversation with, rather than a reduction to, the tradition of sensus communis.. |
