Understanding is interpretation. We read texts, works and actions from within our own history, moving between the part and the whole.
Key thinkers: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Wilhelm Dilthey
The longer story
Hermeneutics is the art of interpretation—understanding texts, practices, and people across the gap of difference. Where phenomenology describes experience as it appears, hermeneutics interprets meaning between perspectives. Gadamer's insight: you can't step outside your own horizon to achieve neutral understanding. But that's not a bug, it's a feature—genuine understanding comes from the 'fusion of horizons' between interpreter and interpreted. The hermeneutic circle: you understand parts through the whole, the whole through parts, spiralling toward deeper understanding. Any interpretive work across historical or cultural distance is hermeneutic, whether you name it or not.