Abstract

In spite of his status as a highly original thinker whose views were, in many ways, ahead of his time and anticipate those of more famous successors, the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder has not received the attention it deserves in mainstream philosophical discourse. In Herder's Hermeneutics, Kristin Gjesdal successfully addresses this deficit by exploring the enlightenment origins of the hermeneutic tradition through a careful and compelling reconstruction of Herder's theory of interpretation. Breaking with the widespread view of Herder as a contra-Enlightenment thinker, Gjesdal conceives of Herder's hermeneutics as contributing to the enlightenment of the Enlightenment project through an immanent critique of...