Friedrich Schleiermacher was by disposition, interest, and profession a theologian, and it is on the basis of his formative work in virtually every area of theology that he has had lasting influence and importance. His hermeneutical theory has been a curious exception to this generalization. People who shared little or none of Schleiermacher's overriding theological interest have taken his highly compressed and often crabbed lecture notes on hermeneutics quite seriously. Especially through Wilhelm Dilthey's interpretation of this lecture material, Schleiermacher's hermeneutical theory passed into the mainstream of twentieth-century European philosophy. He has been regarded within this tradition, with some justice, as the originator of hermeneutics as "the philosophy of understanding" since he first suggested that "understanding" might be the key to a comprehensive theory of the process by which any and all discourse can make sense to us. A number of attempts have been made to improve upon Schleiermacher's own theory by philosophers of understanding who have shared many of his assumptions about the nature of the project, in regard both to the need for a general theory that establishes the conditions for the possibility of all understanding and to the basic conceptual problems such a project poses. One thinks here particularly of Gadamer and Ricoeur, and partially of the later Heidegger. For Schleiermacher, however, even when the most comprehensive principles of hermeneutics are stated in the form of a general theory, the theological import of this enterprise always lies close at hand.' More significantly, Schleiermacher (unlike some exponents of the philosophy of understanding) actually interpreted texts. And one of his