General Theory Of Interpretation

This book is part Seven of a series on general and specific interpretation. It particularly deals with the Juridical, Theological, and Psychological interpretations, which are the most useful for the life in the modern civilized societies. Though these three interpretations are concrete and practical, the theoretical parts are developed in the first four books of the series.

Chapter Six of this Series deals essentially with interpretation and Translation.

This is volume six in the series of the General Theory of Interpretation and offers an insight into Drama and Music

This third volume offers to the readers Chapter Four in English of the 1990 edition of the Teoria Generale dell'Interpretazione by Emilio Betti

The General Theory of Interpretation is a theory of knowledge first and of action thereafter for the acquisition of understanding in those cases when the reality around us is not wholly clear, or is obscured, or is foggy, or is of something never seen before, or yet we never faced it before, and come from things that we call historic, artistic, moral, esthetic, ethical, and unknown. It is a theory structured on reliable bases and supported by the greatest individuals we read about in the histories of philosophy, art, morality, laws, and religions. Interpretation is within the sciences of the spirit (our interior mental life). It is not a physical science, but it is based, as a theory, on solid bases of experience nonetheless. What is it a piece of art? What an artist created. How do we understand this piece of art? By trying to penetrate deeply into it, in order to understand it in its totality of meaning. But that is not enough! The spirit of the artist is made flesh in that piece of art. Knowing the artist's spirit will make us to interpret the piece of art and its creator and thus understand in full the object (piece of art) and the subject (the artist's spirituality when he made the object). Emilio Betti was one of the greatest interpreter, including our social customs and law. The theory of interpretation is also called hermeneutics and the volumes in this series explain, in technical words, how Betti built this important science and adapted it to link history and jurisprudence, in order that all societies could live with a spirit of tolerance and in peace, together.

Chapter Five of the General Theory of Interpretation is certainly the most intriguing for the interpreter. The description and the nature of several fields in which the hermeneutical interpretation is an excellent means for the understanding. The fields introduced and described by Betti in this chapter are the artistic, the literary, the psychological, the sociological, the juridical, and the economical. Technology and history are the two parallel lines within which all this presentation in included. No one ever has done so much as practically explained and given examples in every one of these fields.

With a Foreword by Lars Vinx, this book is the first complete English translation of the Italian jurist, Emilio Betti’s classic work Die Hermeneutik als allgemeine Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften, originally published in 1962. Betti’s hermeneutical theory is presented here as a ‘general methodology of the sciences of the spirit’, such as to allow the achievement of objectivity, however relative it might be. Its central focus is the tension between an object, to be considered in its autonomy, and the subjectivity of the interpreter, who can understand the object only by means of his or her own categories, historical-cultural conditions, and interests. Set against the work of Bultmann and Gadamer, Betti is concerned to limit the arbitrariness of subjectivity without diminishing the place of interpretation. Detailing the principles that govern, and therefore, guide any interpretation, Betti traces how interpretation in art and in literature, as well as in the fields of science, jurisprudence, sociology, and economy, can be said to be objective, albeit only ever in a relative sense. This summa of Betti’s key contribution to hermeneutic theory will be of interest across a range of disciplines, including legal and literary theory, philosophy, as well as the history and sociology of law.

This book was originally published by Macmillan in 1936. It was voted the top Academic Book that Shaped Modern Britain by Academic Book Week (UK) in 2017, and in 2011 was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923. Reissued with a fresh Introduction by the Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman and a new Afterword by Keynes’ biographer Robert Skidelsky, this important work is made available to a new generation. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money transformed economics and changed the face of modern macroeconomics. Keynes’ argument is based on the idea that the level of employment is not determined by the price of labour, but by the spending of money. It gave way to an entirely new approach where employment, inflation and the market economy are concerned. Highly provocative at its time of publication, this book and Keynes’ theories continue to remain the subject of much support and praise, criticism and debate. Economists at any stage in their career will enjoy revisiting this treatise and observing the relevance of Keynes’ work in today’s contemporary climate.

This is a revised and extensively rewritten edition of one of the most influential monographs on legal philosophy published in recent years. Writing in the introduction to the first edition the author characterized Anglophone philosophers as being ..."divided, and often waver[ing] between two main philosophical objectives: the moral evaluation of law and legal institutions, and an account of its actual nature." Questions of methodology have therefore tended to be sidelined, but were bound to surface sooner or later, as they have in the later work of Ronald Dworkin. The main purpose of this book is to provide a critical assessment of Dworkin's methodological turn, away from analytical jurisprudence towards a theory of interpretation, and the issues it gives rise to. The author argues that the importance of Dworkin's interpretative turn is not that it provides a substitute for 'semantic theories of law' (a dubious concept), but that it provides a new conception of jurisprudence, aiming to present itself as a comprehensive rival to the conventionalism manifest in legal positivism. Furthermore, once the interpretative turn is regarded as an overall challenge to conventionalism, it is easier to see why it does not confine itself to a critique of method. Law as interpretation calls into question the main tenets of its positivist rival, in substance as well as method. The book re-examines conventionalism in the light of this interpretative challenge.