Eighteenth-century Hermeneutics: Philosophy of Interpretation in England From Locke to Burke

Studies of hermeneutics have rarely dealt with eighteenth-century British thought, yet during this period debates over the interpretation of texts plagued and invigorated religious, intellectual, and political life in England. This important book is the first to deal with hermeneutical issues in British scriptural, legal, historical, political, and literary interpretation. Examining the work of Swift, Locke, Toland, Bolingbroke, Hume, Reid, Blackstone, and Burke, Joel C. Weinsheimer discusses common philosophical problems of understanding, concentrating especially on their theories about the application of taste to discern interpretive truth. Weinsheimer's approach is primarily philosophical. In each area of hermeneutic endeavor, he asks such questions as why it is necessary to interpret, what it means to interpret, what does not need interpreting, what constitutes the signs of right understanding, and what accounts for the multiplicity of interpretations. He concludes that hermneutics in eighteenth-century England became the site of a contest and possible reconciliation between reason and history. Driven by the need to escape rationalist formalism as well as an opposite though equally sterile antiquarianism, interpretation offered a new way of thinking about truth, as belonging to reason and history together.