Hermeneutics

From Geography

Hermeneutics is an intellectual tradition and an important term in the philosophy. Hermeneutics says that symbolic concepts are the foundation of building up the social-historical world. The origin of the Hermeneutics lies at the early study to language and in the explanation of the Bible and other religious texts.

Until the 19th century, hermeneutics were just interpreting religious texts. They were doing this because they thought that the Bible was a myth and thus so not true. But because they saw some relevance from the Bible in the modern world they started to create up-to-date explanations of the Bible. Till this day, there are still people who explain the Bible in this way, but some people see it as an threat because the Bible isn’t explained in the way is was written (Romeijn, 2003).

According to the Hermeneutics the world is constructed by the language and the actions of individuals. These symbolic concepts, which results out of the language and actions, get interpreted by other people in different ways. (Cloke, Philo and Sadler (1991). For Hermeneutics it is important to know the author. It is only possible to understand and explain a text when you know the life of the author and the community and time he was living in. The hermeneutics is seen as a study of interpretation and meaning. (Johnston, Gregory, Pratt, Watts, 2000). It became a universal principle what means that it can be applied to everything to understand people, not just texts but also conversations. So the entire human life is hermeneutics in the eyes of Gadamer. We are always trying to understand actions of humans (Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy,2009).

The circle of the hermeneutics stands for the everlasting process of interpretation of symbolic concepts. It is a creative and progressive process which will never come to an end. This is because when you hear something you have to know what the words you hear mean to understand a complete sentence. But to make a sentence you need to understand the words (Romeijn, 2003).

On the field of social-geography the term 'hermeneutics' is been used as the study to the relation between humans and place. Hereby the human experiences in his social and spatial environment is been studied (Cloke, Philo and Sadler (1991), p. 90).

References:

Cloke, P., Philo, Ch. and Sadler, D. , Approaching Human Geography (Stage, Londen 1991)

Johnston, R.J., Gregory, D., Pratt, G. Watts, M., The dictionary of Human Geography ( Blackwell Publishing, Oxford 4th edition 2000)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2009). Hans-Georg Gadamer. Found on 8 September 2011, at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/.

Romeijn, P. (2003). Hermeneutiek. Found on 8 september 2011, at http://www.promeijn.nl/Filosofie%20en%20vrijmetselarij/Filosofie%20bouwstukken/filosofiepietroa.html

See also Hermeneutiek [1]

Authors:

Published by Meryl Burger s0801704

Edited by Jobke Heij, 8 september 2011