Philosophische Ansätze in den philologischen Enzyklopädien des 19. Jahrhunderts

Schleiermacher's dictum that the starting point of philosophizing must be situated of the heart of the dialogical communication provides the best expression of the philosophical spirit incorporated in the encyclopedias that enabled the emancipation of the philological disciplines in the nineteenth century. It is this spirit that is at issue in the present paper. The entanglement of the emancipation and advancing institutionalization of philology with philosophical approaches to hermeneutics is examined in three steps. The first one places the focus on the extended construal of the hermeneutic circle. The second step consists in exploring the relationship between the theory of philological critique and dialectics (the study of dialogical communication) with special emphasis on the concept of language thinking. The third step builds on the theme of the potential endlessness of interpretation.