At least from the time of Dilthey's 1900 essay on “The Development of Hermeneutics,” Schleiermacher's has been the first name to occur to anyone speaking or hearing of hermeneutics in Germany. When Dilthey celebrates him as the founder of a scientific hermeneutics, it is not merely on account of the high position Schleiermacher held among his contemporaries, nor because of the intensity with which he worked on the problems of hermeneutics in the two-and-a-half decades between 1805 and 1829. (His earliest notes on the subject date from 1805 and he delivered his two addresses on the concept of hermeneutics in 1829 in Berlin.) Dilthey's essay also bears witness to the affinity between the methodology he himself framed for the humanities and Schleiermacher's hermeneutics, an affinity which prevented Dilthey from doing justice to, say, the hermeneutics of the Enlightenment. Without wishing to belittle Schleiermacher's contribution in the least, it is nevertheless impossible, upon examination of the historical premises and the contemporary state of hermeneutics, for us to follow Dilthey in viewing Schleiermacher as the founder of a new science, or discipline. We intend rather to place his concept of hermeneutics in historical context and to examine his theses on hermeneutics in terms of our contemporary understanding of literature and history.

The date of Schleiermacher's two addresses to the Academy, 1829, indicates that German Idealism arrived at its formulation of hermeneutics only very late.