Hans-George Gadmer's Hermenuetics

With the complexity of human life, symobles especialhy in their written forms have greatly affected man's life. Since symobles invite man to a world which manifests itself through the use of symbols and because of their lack of explicit indications ascribed to the ambiguity of their meanings, man feels that there is no way to explore the worldof hidden meanings of symobles, other than turning to interpretation. At first glance, hermeneutics is thought to be a discipline to which one turns to understand the written symbols to know their hidden meaning by discovering the appropriate rules of interpreting the meanings. This discipline witnessed fundamental changes in Heidegger andGadamer's system of thoughts and instead of being a discipline "object of understanding", it has come to mean "understanding" hermeuntic questions. This study touches on the chage of hermenuetics from espistemology to Heidegger and Gadamer's ontology and reviews Gadamer's ideas concerning this subject.