The Legal Theory Bookworm recommends The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics, edited by Niall Keane & Chris Lawn. Here is a description:
A Companion to Hermeneutics is a collection of original essays from leading international scholars that provide a definitive historical and critical compendium of philosophical hermeneutics.
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- Offers a definitive historical, systematic, and critical compendium of hermeneutics
- Represents state-of-the-art thinking on the major themes, topics, concepts and figures of the hermeneutic tradition in philosophy and those who have influenced hermeneutic thought, including Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Foucault, Habermas, and Rorty
- Explores the art and theory of interpretation as it intersects with a number of philosophical and inter-disciplinary areas, including humanism, theology, literature, politics, education and law
- Features contributions from an international cast of leading and upcoming scholars, who offer historically informed, philosophically comprehensive, and critically astute contributions in their individual fields of expertise
- Written to be accessible to interested non-specialists, as well as professional philosophers
This is a comprehensive introduction to "hermeneutics" in the broad sense. There is an excellent essay on hermeneutics by Francis J. Mootz, III. Recommended for anyone interested in the legal implications of the philosophical hermeneutic tradition for legal interpretation--but not a good resource for those interested in contemporary theoretical linguistics or the philosophy of language within the broadly analytic tradition. In other words, Gadamer, not Grice.
