Abstract

The concept of understanding appears initially at the point of intersection between the philological, hermeneutical and the theological‐philosophical traditions. The concept of understanding already appears as a philosophical term in the language of the mystics, starting from Augustine, for whom it had a broader significance than merely seeing. The Kantian concept of understanding is subsequently re‐appropriated quite originally by Hamann who, by stressing the limits of the human understanding of the book of nature, develops the idea of historical understanding, grasped as a situating oneself in the past that presupposes an understanding of the present and a foreseeing of the future. One of the most relevant philosophical problems that remains after Wittgenstein and Gadamer is that of the relation between understanding and interpretation. Not all understanding is interpreting, and where there is understanding, there is not interpreting and translating, but simply “speech”.