Friedrich Schleiermacher

That history—not only in the form of the lived experience of a writer, but also the history of the appropriation of a text—should be of supreme importance in grasping the meaning of a body of work, is a theme that runs throughout Richard Crouter's book on Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), arguably the most significant Christian theologian since the middle ages. Exploring several facets of Schleiermacher's oeuvre, the book investigates “religious debates and questions within the complex details of personal, social, and institutional history” (9). Schleiermacher's influence, however, extended beyond the field of theology: he made lasting contributions to philosophy, in particular, in the fields of hermeneutics and the theory of knowledge. Significantly, Crouter makes use of Schleiermacher's own insights into hermeneutics in an effort to understand him. Schleiermacher stressed the ineradicably subjective and perspectival element present in all apprehensions and expressions of human knowledge. Hence, it is important to situate a person's utterances in their historical context in order to understand them. This situating is the task of Crouter's book: Schleiermacher's work is positioned not only in relation to his own life and practice, but in relation to the thought and practice of both his contemporaries and that of later thinkers, who were in some way influenced by him. Furthermore, Schleiermacher's “cultural location between Enlightenment and Romanticism” (1) is explored.

Appropriation · Art · Context (archaeology) · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Field (mathematics) · Hermeneutics · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Relation (database) · Romanticism · Theme (computing) · Classical Studies and Philology · History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity