Verstehen
ITEM: I conveyed to MMM that I was interested in doing a Verstehenanalyse of her known written work; I refered her, in a phrasal 'chop' to Max Weber in the mode of Symbolic Interactionism; I do not think Weber schools anyone on what his version of Verstehen consists, and in all I find him a rather sloppy and virtually muddled 'armchair soc guy' of which there have been many, possibly excepting the modern breed of social scientist with better concern for the scientific method. Nevertheless, Weber was merely ensconced in a mostly-German tradition of interpretation which had been around on the Continent for more than 100 years. For the most thorough explication of 'the science of understanding' I would begin-- and almost end-- with the book Hermeneutik und Kritik by Friedrich Schleiermacher; the work is based on S's translation of (especially) the New Testament and Plato-- this latter corpus-translation still considered definitive. Substantively, to return t...