Fall 2026 | Hermeneutics – An Introduction | Philosophy Seminar
Human beings are always interpreting: words, gestures, events, traditions, texts, and, perhaps most of all, one another. But interpretation is not simply extracting a meaning from these things we encounter. Every attempt to understand brings us into further questions: What makes understanding possible in the first place? How much does history—personal and worldly—determine our possibilities for understanding? Can we interpret without presuppositions or “prejudices”? What happens when different horizons of meaning come into contact?
These questions stand at the center of philosophical hermeneutics, the subject of this Lyceum Institute Fall 2026 seminar.
Hermeneutics began as a discipline specifically concerned with the interpretation of texts. In the twentieth-century, however, it grew into something more fundamental: an inquiry into the nature of understanding itself. We cannot determine how a text should be interpreted, that is, if we are not sure what is happening in interpretation in the first place.
This seminar approaches that question principally through two of the twentieth century’s most important hermeneutical thinkers: Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.
Gadamer emphasizes the historical and dialogical character of understanding. Human beings do not encounter the world from nowhere but always stand within inherited traditions of language and thought. The person’s understanding therefore develops through a certain encounter and resolution of horizons.
Ricoeur takes up many of the same problems while placing greater emphasis upon mediation: the distance created by texts, metaphors, and narrative. Meaning, for Ricoeur, is neither given nor arbitrarily imposed but worked through, explained, and ultimately “appropriated”.
Gadamer and Ricoeur offer us two ways of thinking about a problem far beyond the interpretation of the written word: ultimately, the question of how we make sense of our own living. Amidst the psychological turmoil we all know today too well, such a question is hardly “academic”.
Over eight weeks, participants will work through major texts from both thinkers, supported by recorded lectures and live Saturday discussions led by Richard Sharpe. The seminar is designed not merely to introduce a body of theory, but to foster the practice of interpretation itself: careful reading, deep and thoughtful questioning, and, as always, ordering our understanding through regular dialogue.
The seminar meets Saturdays from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM Eastern during Fall 2026.
Join the Lyceum Institute this fall for a sustained inquiry into what it means to understand.
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