First published in 1988, this book constitutes a comprehensive reconstruction of the historical development of hermeneutics. Its translation is augmented by a theoretical afterword especially written by the author for this English-language edition. Not only does the author discuss thinkers, such as Plato, Vico, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas and Derrida, but he also considers the contributions of figures that fall outside the contemporary canon of maitres a penser, from the philosophers of the Reformation, to the flourishing of biblical interpretation in the German Englightenment, to contemporary theoreticians, such as Emilio Betti.