Andrew Bowie

While people have a remarkable facility for understanding often hugely complex forms of communication and interaction in everyday cultural and social contexts, from the structures of symphonic works to what their partner means when they say “I don't understand Brahms”, philosophical analysis seeks to isolate one form of understanding as if it were the key to all others. In order to become language, noises and marks have to be in a manner in which non‐linguistic things are not. The essential divide in contemporary approaches to these concerning language and understanding lies between those, who think that a theory of meaning must also give us an account of the notion of truth without presupposing an understanding of truth, and those, like Heidegger, who think truth must in some way be presupposed. It is here that the hermeneutic tradition allows to consider one of the least adequately addressed issues in modern philosophy.

The founding text of modern hermeneutics. Written by the philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher as a method for the interpretation and textual criticism of the New Testament, it develops ideas about language and the interpretation of texts that are in many respects still unsurpassed and are becoming current in the contemporary philosophy of language. Contrary to the traditional view of Schleiermacher as a theorist of empathetic interpretation, in this text he offers a view of understanding that acknowledges both the structurally and historically determined aspects of language and the need to take account of the activity of the individual subject in the constitution of meaning. This volume offers the text in a new translation by Andrew Bowie, together with related writings on secular hermeneutics and on language, and an introduction that places the texts in the context of Schleiermacher's philosophy as a whole.

On the History of Modern Philosophy is a key transitional text in the history of European philosophy. In it, F. W. J. Schelling surveys philosophy from Descartes to German Idealism and shows why the Idealist project is ultimately doomed to failure. The lectures trace the path of philosophy from Descartes through Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, to Hegel and Schelling's own work. The extensive critiques of Hegel prefigure many of the arguments to be found in Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. This is the first English translation of On the History of Modern Philosophy. In his introduction Andrew Bowie sets the work in the context of Schelling's career and clarifies its philosophical issues. The translation will be of special interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, literary theorists, and theologians.