one Schleiermacher's universal hermeneutics

1. 1. How does Schleiermacher's discussion of language compare to your own understanding of what language is and how we learn it?

2. 2. Using a student paper or other linguistic expression, try to interpret it using Schleiermacher's hermeneutics.

3. 3. Take a contemporary interpretation of a poem and compare it to Schleiermacher's discussion of grammatical and psychological interpretation. What similarities and differences do you find?

two Dilthey's hermeneutic understanding

1. 1. Do you agree with Dilthey that there is a difference between explanation and understanding with reference to the separation of the human sciences from the natural sciences? Explain your answer.

2. 2. Develop a short list of the different types of elemental understanding you have learned. Evaluate the connection between inner meaning and external manifestation.

3. 3. How would Dilthey describe the process of understanding a literary work of art, perhaps a play by Shakespeare? To what extent have you re-experienced what the author intended? And how would you say that in understanding it you have re-experienced what the author intended?

three Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology

1. 1. Do you think that Heidegger's phenomenological description of how we encounter the things of this world as they show themselves from themselves is accurate when he says we first encounter them as useful things and only later and derivatively as objectively present objects?

2. 2. Is understanding always interpretive? Examine a complicated case, perhaps a philosophical text (in a simple case we are too likely to overlook some steps).

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