The term philosophical hermeneutics captures Hans-Georg Gadamer’s central achievement: transforming hermeneutics from a specialized method of textual interpretation into a philosophical account of human existence itself. Traditionally, hermeneutics was tied to techniques of understanding—rules for interpreting Scripture, legal texts, or historical documents. By the 19th century, figures like Schleiermacher and Dilthey had framed it as a methodological foundation for the human sciences. Gadamer, however, following Heidegger’s existential analytic, broke decisively with this methodological focus. For him, hermeneutics is not a toolbox for scholars but a description of the universal conditions under which all understanding takes place.
Philosophical hermeneutics begins with the recognition that understanding is not a detached cognitive act but a mode of being. Human beings are interpretive creatures: we exist always within histories, traditions, and languages that shape our outlooks. There is no standpoint outside of this interpretive condition, no “view from nowhere.” Instead, every act of knowing or experiencing the world is already mediated by prejudices, inherited concepts, and cultural frameworks. Far from undermining truth, this historical situatedness is what makes truth possible.
The “philosophical” dimension of Gadamer’s hermeneutics lies in its orientation toward ontology rather than methodology. It asks not how we should interpret but what it means that we are interpretive beings at all. Understanding is thus revealed as dialogical: it unfolds in conversation, in the fusion of horizons between past and present, self and other. This means that truth is not a possession but an event—something that happens in interpretation when a subject matter speaks to us and expands our horizon.
The significance of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is twofold. First, it rehabilitates tradition and prejudice as conditions of insight rather than obstacles. Second, it insists that art, history, and dialogue reveal truths irreducible to scientific or technical knowledge. By doing so, Gadamer offered a defense of the humanities and a vision of philosophy as the ongoing practice of openness, solidarity, and conversation. Philosophical hermeneutics, then, is nothing less than the account of how we exist in and through understanding.