Abstract

The author wants to analize the role of the philosophical concept of "polis" in determining the ontological significance of hermeneutics, considering it not as a simple art of interpreting, but as a feature of the human way of being. The first part shows how the hermeneutics found, in its history, its birth in Christianity; this, anyway, doesn't allow to understand the basic meaning of hermeneutics. The second part, on Heidegger's thought explanation, shows the mutual relationship between hermeneutics and the thought of the "polis": this basic relationship comes out with the analisys of the concepts of decision and violence. At the end, the distance between the essentialistic position, considering hermeneutics as an help to politics, and an hermeneutics which, on the other hand, defers to the historical position of man in the world and, therefore, to the problem of being, is underlined.