Linguistics Meets Hermeneutics: Reading Early Greek Epistemological Texts

In his seminal 1986 work “The resistance to theory” Paul De Man rephrases the notion of philology as “an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces” (p. 24). He points out that literary criticism becomes important as soon as the approach to literary texts ceases being based on historical and aesthetic considerations, but moves closer to linguistics. Texts should be read “closely as texts” and not move “at once into general context of human experience or history” (p. 23). In this paper a pragmatic approach in interpreting early Greek epistemological thought is applied as a tool to analyze cognitive mechanisms of a multi-layered process of textual exegesis and interpretation. The passages selected for analysis engage in the first epistemological and gnoseological critical considerations and construct early approaches for the theoretical discussion of the methodology of criticism and hermeneutics in terms of concepts and vocabulary up until the first half of the fifth century BCE. I argue that the same syntactic formulas and structural models are used when the author introduces or summarizes a self-referential or critical judgment as an innovative form, as this evolved in the late Archaic period. Thus a distance between the author and his product is emphasized and a coherent message is transmitted to the audience, framed in an always syntactically recognizable construction.