Humanities and the Question of Interpretation: From Epistemology to Textual Hermeneutics

Abstract

The research aims to highlight the importance of interpretation in the field of humanities in general and its need for it in view of the new possibilities it provides within it for reading and understanding first and to flip the consideration of issues and facts second away from the constraints of the authority of the ideal model, and the illusion of objectivity, absolutism, and other starting points with which the meaning is confined within narrow circles and specific boundaries that undermine the foundations of creative reading and freeze creative understanding because it is guided by the logic of epistemology - the foundational standard in particular - that requires the existence of the first fixed origin and the transcendent center on which comprehension is based, contrary to contemporary textual hermeneutics, which do not seek at all to fence off facts or direct understanding towards a narrow horizon in a way that leads to the establishment of complete and final knowledge systems. In order to clarify the main features of this turning point in the scope of the human sciences, the research stops at three cognitive systems (paradigms): the system of conformity, the system of participation, and then the system of difference, with a discussion of the nature of the hermeneutic style connected to each system separately on the one hand, and the nature of the formed perception regarding the "text" on the other hand to invest all of these in deducing that the most effective hermeneutic style in developing and enriching the human sciences - with its texts and issues - is the style that is based on the "principle of difference and transgression."