Five Views on Hermeneutics:

Philosophical hermeneutics is not a method or strategy for interpreting.

(p.32)

But Gadamer undertakes a different task. "The hermeneutic

phenomenon is basically not a problem of method at all."10 It is
concerned with a different kind of knowledge and truth from that of
modern science. The task "is not to develop a procedure of understanding,
but to clarify the conditions in which understanding takes place. But these
conditions do not amount to a `procedure' or method which the interpreter
must of himself bring to bear on the text; rather they must be given.""
Accordingly, "I did not intend to produce a manual for guiding
understanding.... My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do
or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our
wanting and doing."" In other words, the question is: what is going on,
often behind our backs, when we interpret texts and other phenomena?
(p.32)
Hermeneutical Circle.

When we come to interpret texts we presuppose and bring with us an

idea of the whole that guides our reading of the parts. This anticipation
may involve the genre of the work, the purpose of the author, the work's
central theses and so forth. It functions, in Kantian language, as the a
priori element in interpretation. It is the condition for the possibility of
finding meaning in the text. Yet it is importantly unlike the Kantian a priori.
Kant thinks the forms of sense and the categories of understanding are
universal and necessary, ahistorically at work in human thought in all
times and places. But within the hermeneutical circle the a priori
elements, the presuppositions and anticipations, are not fixed and
permanent. Rather, in light of the interpretations to which they give rise,
they are revisable or replaceable. The two elements of guiding
presuppositions and guided interpretations mutually condition each other.
This is the hermeneutic circle (p.32)

For Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur, the hermeneutical circle is a

matter of presuppositions in general and does not focus on the whole-part
relation. The claim is that, in any domain where interpretation takes place,
there is no such thing as presuppositionless thought. Since the latter ideal
is