Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Nightmare of History

Philosophical hermeneutics was an attempt to salvage philosophy in the 20th Century by incorporating the way in which thought and language are historical phenomena and abandoning the goal of absolute certainty in the pursuit of eternal truth. This book is an exploration of its origins and implications in the thought of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, Paul Ricoeur and Owen Barfield.

There are also complementary essays on Norman O. Brown and Richard Rorty