Paul Ricoeur’s and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Theory of Interpretation: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

The article aims to analyze the hermeneutics of discourse outlined by Paul Ricoeur in his Interpretation Theory, and to compare the themes  related to it with the issues raised by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophy. In his work, Ricoeur presents interpretation as a dialectical process going from naive understanding to explanation, and then from explanation to a deeper understanding. At each of these three stages, some problems arise with which Gadamer had struggled several years earlier in his Truth and Method. However, it is Ricoeur’s concept that will be the starting point for the author  as it displays the issue of interpretation in a systematic and orderly manner, while analogous themes  regarding interpretation which can be found in Gadamer, are distributed among many of his works and are often intertwined with issues not directly related to the phenomenon of understanding itself.