Hermeneutic philosophy, understood as a general theory of human understanding, is associated with the names of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Ricoeur and Gadamer developed their hermeneutic philosophies in relative independence of one another, and their theories first emerged in rather different forms: Gadamer's in 1960 in Wahrheit und Methode, a historically presented conception applied primarily to the practice of the humanistic disciplines; Ricoeur's in 1965 in De l'interpretation, an essay on Freud.¹ But both philosophers take their cue from Heidegger in Being and Time and this lends their efforts a common provenance and a common accent.