Introduzione

The history of contemporary hermeneutics is rooted in the Enlightenment, starting from the issue of the interpretation of the Scriptures, in the wake of Baruch Spinoza and Richard Simon. This is also the beginning of Christian Wolff’s reflections, that he carried out not only in the works which deal specifically with textual hermeneutics, from the German Logic to the Latin one, but also in his confrontation with other thinkers, like Malebranche and Locke. Johann Martin Chladenius and Georg Friedrich Meier, just to name a few, take the idea of a general hermeneutics from Wolff, both with respect to the systematic character as well as to the relationship between interpretation and the issue of the knowledge. The present volume pays special attention also to theology, stressing the originality of Wolff’s position compared with authors such as Johann Lorenz Schmidt and Johann Salomo Semler, whose thought on biblical interpretation is a radicalization of the grounds of the Wolffian rationalism. Thus, Christian Wolff is shown to be the reference point for the hermeneutics of the Enlightenment, both as a polemical objective and as a starting point for further developments