Where to start with hermeneutics? Schleiermacher? Guenon? Barthes? Is a solid base on semiology necessary to learn about this field?
Hermeneutics
William Sullivan
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Nathaniel Young
Why don't you ask your professor?
Elijah Hernandez
Hermeneutics is a big and old category.
Schleiermacher was important as he was the first to expand hermeneutics from a Theological field to wider Philosophy of Interpretation but I don't think he is essential to read today.
Reading Dilthey and Gadamer will tell you everything you need to know on him, I also suggest you look into Edmund Husserl particularly The Crisis
Jacob Cooper
Read the Stanford Encyclopedia article on it for starters. Schleiermacher is interesting in certain respects, and I have a bias here (he influenced Ranke's historical hermeneutics, which influenced 19th century Geisteswissenschaften) but not really necessary and not a good place to start. You want to have basic background on two things: the actual tradition of textual (especially scriptural) criticism called hermeneutics, and then the vague idealist milieu that hermeneutics in the modern sense grew out of.
Dilthey is where you want to start, but you're better off getting an understanding of Dilthey's basic outlines and (in my strong opinion) the intellectual context in which he was writing, i.e. as a response to Comtean and related positivist epistemologies of science which were felt to be seriously challenging the epistemological primacy of idealism, including other similar attempts at such like Droysen, Rickert, and Windelband. Collingwood's Principles of History (easily pirated) actually has a nice little skim of this so-called crisis of historicism and of its major figures, stating that Dilthey is the one that really gelled the hermeneutic thesis. Of course, he also founded the distinction between Geistes- and Naturwissenschaften (but again, similar to idiographic and nomothetic distinction of Windelband). Just some basic understanding of this helps. In all honesty, unless you're doing real research on the topic, there's not much reason to jump into Dilthey himself.
Subsequent hermeneutics is more difficult because it branches in so many directions. The neo-positivists of the Vienna circle were directly responding to the crisis of historicism and Dilthey's division, Husserl significantly was, and Heidegger departs from Dilthey and Husserl, especially in his earlier work, etc. But Heideggerian hermeneutics are their own thing, and so is Gadamer (e.g.), who is departing from Being and Time. The Diltheyan division/crisis also branches off into a lot of other fields and touches on a lot of things - Habermas, e.g., who debated Dilthey, Ricoeur, but just so many. It's a huge question. I wish I had a single survey book to recommend.
Carter Young
Sorry, Habermas debated Gadamer.
Jackson Nguyen
Shleiermacher is pretty good, after him you can easily read Gadamer who refers to Shleiermacher a lot. Then Ricoeur, Barthes
Aaron Reed
What professor? This is just a personal interest
thanks friends
Definitely interested in being able to understand Heidegger at some point
Daniel White
Herder. And read Michael Forster's work on Herder and Hermeneutics in general.
Carson Ramirez
>I wish I had a single survey book to recommend.
Not a book but:
Ethan Smith
>personal interest
Do you study Quantum Mechanics out of personal interest too? Jesus.