Hermeneutically oriented philosophy aims at deciphering the meaning of Being, the meaning of Being-in-the-world, and its central concept if that of interpretation.
In it broadest sense hermeneutics means "interpretation", but in a more specialized sense, it usually refers to textual interpretation and to reading. Reflection on the practice of interpretation arose in modern European culture as the result of the attempt to understand what had been handed down within that culture from the past.
Interpretation (Auslegung ) is now seen as the explicit, conscious understanding of meanings under conditions where an understanding of those meanings can no longer be presumed to be a self-evident process but is viewed as intrinsically problematic; it is here assumed that misunderstandings about what we seek to interpret will arise not simply occasionally, but systematically. (Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, p 95)
Jurisprudence and theology are essentially hermeneutic procedures, because both depend on the exegesis of written texts. In both cases the act of interpretation is in principle normative; in both cases the process of understanding is an act of application.
In his introduction to Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer states that the hermeneutic phenomenon is basically not a problem of method at all, although it is concerned with knowledge and truth. For Gadamer, the phenomenon of understanding is to be found in modes of experience that lie outside the universal claims of scientific method-- the experiences of art, of philosophy, and of history itself.
The hermeneutic universe constitutes the unity of the world in which we live as men through the way we experience one another, the way we experience historical traditions, and the way that we experience the natural giveness of our existence and of our world. "If thought is to be conscientious, it must become aware of these anterior influences." The hermeneutical understanding is basically circular: Reason's task is not to liberate itself from the tradition in which it originated, (the goal of the enlightenment -- to achieve self-determination and self-sufficiency) Instead, the task of reason is to clarify its own place in this tradition. As a result Reason participates in building the tradition in which it finds itself. This completes the hermeneutic circle.
"Hermeneutics is an expression of hope that the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled. ... Epistemology proceeds on the assumption that all contributions to a given discourse are commensurable. Hermeneutics is largely a struggle against this assumption." (Richard Rorty, The Mirror of Nature, pp315-6) For Rorty, the line between epistemology and hermeneutics is purely one of familiarity. Epistemology is possible in a context of of agreed-upon practices of inquiry (like Kuhn's normal science), but hermeneutics is required in a situation where we do not understand what is happening, but are honest enough to admit it.
cf representation
In describing his own work as a genealogy or history of truth, Michel Foucault saw his task as "examining both the difference that keeps us at a remove from a way of thinking in which we recognize the origin of our own, and the proximity that remains in spite of that distance which we never cease to explore."