Hermeneutical Probability: Thomasius’ Problematic, but Promising Response to Skepticism

Abstract While the skeptical undercurrents of early modern thought have received sustained scholarly attention, such work has tended to be inattentive to hermeneutical or exegetical skepticism. This is a form of skepticism that threatened to stop hermeneutical theorizing in its tracks and absorbed several central hermeneutical concepts in its orbit. Hermeneutical probability was one of them. In this paper, I aim to examine whether the doctrine of hermeneutical probability as it was originally formulated by Christian Thomasius is a surrogate of exegetical skepticism. I argue that not only is the examined view incompatible with skepticism, but that it can indeed articulate a promising response to it. Since general reflection on probability shaped the philosophical landscape of the Early German Enlightenment, the viability of the Thomasian view has much broader ramifications that extend beyond hermeneutics to historics, ethics, and physics.