Hermeneutic approaches to the interpretation of philosophical texts

Today, hermeneutics is not only one of the methods of various humanitarian sciences, but also an independent field of science. In the historical and philosophical retrospective, the first attempts to decipher the meaning of ancient texts containing artistic and mythological images about the system of the world order come into contact with the emergence of the first efforts of the ancient Greeks towards the spontaneous generation of rational philosophical thinking, which consists in highlighting a fundamentally new position in relation to the established system of ideas. The rethinking of Homer's texts, which are the basis of Western European philosophical thought, necessitated a total reconstruction of texts that had lost their original meaning due to natural linguistic transformations associated with the displacement of certain lexical units from the dictionary of the ancient Greek language. In addition, the cognitive value of previous thinkers, who turned to an exemplary historical source of wisdom, required the transformation of the meanings of ancient texts, whose study and understanding faced the emergence of various kinds of distortions.

On the basis of the practical need to reconstruct the most ancient texts in a form that is understandable to contemporaries, one of the first proto-hermeneutic practices is born, which consists in the desire to reproduce the system of linguistic constructions corresponding to the original, as much as possible consistent in their semantics. However, the established proto-hermeneutic tradition did not represent a systematic and mature system, but offered only a set of disparate methods, whose effectiveness was often based mainly on the intuitionism of the interpreter. Hermeneutics acquires the strongest position as a result of Christian intervention in ancient Greek culture, accompanied by the active involvement of Christian religious texts in ever larger sections of the population. With the expansion of cultural, trade and economic ties, there is an increasing need for the translation of sacred writings into Greek, namely the Old Testament, the understanding of the content of which required the application of certain principles of interpretation. In connection with the need to eliminate the emerging uncertainties, distortions and contradictions in the analysis of biblical texts, two opposing directions of the theoretical principles of hermeneutics are formed in the person of the Alexandrian and Pergamon schools, which were developed on the basis of two libraries.

The diametricality of the views of the system of alternative conceptual foundations in solving one of the first hermeneutic problems, which consists in recognizing the absolute singularity or plurality of meanings in one particular word, leads to the formation of two fundamental principles of interpretation -hermeneutic nominalism and hermeneutic ... Born in the bosom of exegetics, which is a branch of theology, in which biblical texts were interpreted, hermeneutics is being introduced into the sphere of jurisprudence and philology, securing the status of the most important tool for explaining the semantic basis of the text. A fundamental step in the development of hermeneutics as a science was the work of the outstanding philosopher and Christian theologian Aurelius Augustine “Christian Science, or the Foundations of Sacred Hermeneutics and the Art of Church Oratory”. The methodological value of this work comes down to the universalization and systematization of the previously used methods of interpretation in the face of such ancient Greek thinkers as Artemidorus of Daldian, Antiphon of Athens, Aristander of Telmes, Origen and others. A conceptually new discovery of Augustine was the theory of signs differentiated by the thinker into natural and artificial, as well as the introduction of a fundamentally new idea of the phenomenon of "understanding", correlating with the comprehension of "meaning", which is the basis of the methodological foundation of hermeneutics and semiotics. Being one of the founders of the principle of the contextual approach in hermeneutics, the Christian theologian sees in the interpretation of the Bible the presence of such semantic-linguistic constructions that can be understood only within the framework of theological discourse, which has a specific form of narration, in contrast to philosophical and artistic ones.

The hermeneutic doctrine of Augustine, which became widely known until the beginning of the 9th century, remained the main methodological guide to the interpretation of religious texts. Starting from the 10th century, jurisprudence joins the hermeneutical corpus, the basis of the interpretative basis of which is the synthesis of scholastic and dialectical methods, which, in turn, contributes to the formation of a new discipline called legal hermeneutics. Among the prominent philosophers who have presented extensive works in the field of legal hermeneutics is Hugo Grotius, who detailed methods for interpreting specific linguistic constructions that have both contextual differences depending on the built-in contexts and meanings.

The emerging inconsistencies and contradictions, often found in the interpretation of legal texts, were thus considered within the framework of the hermeneutic approach, which made it possible to strengthen its position in the formation of a separate section of jurisprudence, introducing the theory of interpretation into the general teaching program. The Lutheran theologian Matthias Flacius of Illyria, in view of the emergence of specific social requirements related to the solution of practical problems of the socio-political reform movements of that time, includes in hermeneutics the principle of contextual interpretation in the context of its translinguistic function, which makes it possible to avoid the polyvariability of the number of meanings of one particular word.The opposition of meaning as an inexhaustible source of understanding and meaning as a single and basic content of a particular semantic sign is most clearly seen in Flacius on the basis of the analysis of the logical opposition between the ratio of the part and the whole.

The philosopher from the point of view of goal-setting, attention to which the thinkers of the past did not particularly conceptualize studies the principle of the hermeneutic circle as a fundamental concept of philosophical hermeneutics. The systematization of the methodological apparatus of hermeneutics gradually leads to the expansion of the spectrum of its consideration within the framework of Wolfianism, namely, in the person of I.M. Khladenius, thanks to which special recognition of hermeneutics is achieved by introducing this methodological toolkit into alternative areas of knowledge to theology, for example, history. Bringing hermeneutics to a completely new logical and philosophical level and accentuating psychology as the most important tool of hermeneutics allowed Chladenius to strengthen its status in private scientific disciplines. The analysis of various scientific and philosophical sources contains many different definitions of hermeneutics, subdivided according to their breadth and level of coverage. In a narrow sense, hermeneutics (Greek hermeneutike - interpretation) is the art of interpretation, the theory of interpretation and understanding of texts. In a broad sense, this term defines a trend in philosophy in which understanding is seen as a condition (comprehension) of social being.

The problem of understanding the meaning of a philosophical, scientific or artistic text, the source of which, as a rule, is a subject or a set of subjects, lies in the interpretation of hermeneutics, which is based on some “art of comprehending someone else's individuality”. The evolution of the hermeneutic method from a primitive form of exegesis to the most complex system of interpretations based on philosophy, history, psychology and logic brings hermeneutics to a completely new level, which consists in recognizing its autonomy in the system of humanities.