Introduction

Timothy J. Stapleton

pp. 1-14

in: Timothy J. Stapleton (ed), The question of hermeneutics, Berlin, Springer, 1994

Abstract

The collection of essays presented here under the title, "The Question of Hermeneutics," represents more than anything else an attempt to take stock of things. Ours has been a century of extraordinary change; and change of a sort that appears only to be accelerating as the millennium draws to a close. To have lived through this century is to incarnate the memory of an historical epoch unsurpassed in terms of quantitative shifts. But many today, when speaking of this era, would hesitate to use terms like "progress" or "development." These words which came so easily, so confidently in times past, as part of the stock vocabulary of "modernity," now signify precisely those concepts which are most suspect when reflecting on "the fate of the West" today. At the core of these doubts are suspicions about that which, culturally, is most our own; about those paradigmatic embodiments of Western rationality, about science and technology and their respective claims to truth and value. Is the truth of science no more than a privilege granted the power of calculative, instrumental thinking?