Abstract

August Boeckh, in his Encyclopedia and Methodology of the Philological Sciences provides an account of the methodology of philology (or what otherwise might be called methodological hermeneutics) that is the culmination of the development of the science of philology in the nineteenth century. Boeckh importantly defines philology in relation to philosophy and to history. Philosophy is the knowledge of the truth, gnosis, while philology is the knowledge of what has been known, anagnosis. Boeckh's hermeneutics provide the background for much of the theory and practice of the twentieth and twentieth‐first centuries. Those who have looked for method in hermeneutics have looked to Boeckh. Those, like Hans‐Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, who have been critical of the methodologism and scientism in nineteenth‐century hermeneutics, have often considered Boeckh a leading example of these features which they would overcome.