Abstract

Fifty years after the death of Emilio Betti, jurist from Camerino and author of the General Theory of Interpretation, this essay proposes to re-evaluate his work, wondering the reason for its lack of adequate consideration in contemporary culture. Betti’s theory of interpretation is reconstructed starting from its fundamental philosophical core, namely the problem of the relationship between the knowing subject and the object to be known, showing its composite philosophical origins in the historicist and romantic German tradition. Once analysed the intense polemic debate between Betti and Gadamer, theoricians of two alternative conceptions of hermeneutics, the essay acknowledges Betti’s merit in posing the problem of the objectivity of interpretation. The Author attributes the main reason for Betti’s scarce fortune in contemporary thought to Betti’s obsolete language and to his rejection of the “Linguistic Turnµ of the first decades of the twentieth century.