Philosophy, Religion, and the Hermeneutic Imperative

Abstract This is an essay about the meaning of life. It is hence about our hermeneutical self-understanding. The word meaning notoriously has many meanings, and indeed in at least two senses of that term in its primary occurrence in the preceding sentence. And it might be thought that when we seek the meaning of a text and the meaning of our life we are seeking not simply different meanings, but different kinds of things entirely-that the first inquiry is properly hermeneutical and that the second is perhaps religious, or at least phenomenological.