Critique of Understanding Reason

The elimination of this shortcoming is what Vittorio Hösle seeks to accomplish with his new big book. In particular, he is concerned with showing the possibility of intersubjectively valid understanding. For the denial of this possibility, which has become commonplace in the postmodern era, endangers the humanities to the core. Hösle’s book offers not only a detailed, Kant-inspired analytics and systematics of complex acts of understanding, taking into account, for example, jurisprudence and theology. It also subjects onesided hermeneutic theories to criticism, including Freud’s psychoanalysis. Finally, a third and concluding section provides a brief history of hermeneutics, from ancient times to the work of Gadamer and Davidson, with a view towards the humanities of the future.