 In hermeneutics, by contrast, the emphasis is on the ‘circularity’ of understanding. This emphasis is familiar from the concept of the hermeneutical circle. Central to hermeneutics, this concept is not only highly disputed but has also been developed in a number of distinct manners. Broadly, however, the concept of the hermeneutical circle signifies that, in interpretive experience, a new understanding is achieved not on the basis of already securely founded beliefs. Instead, a new understanding is achieved through renewed interpretive attention to further possible meanings of those presuppositions which, sometimes tacitly, inform the understanding that we already  have.[2]  Philosophers have described such hermeneutically circular presuppositions in different ways and, since Heidegger, especially in terms of presuppositions of the existential and historical contexts in which we find ourselves. This contemporary significance of hermeneutically circular presuppositions has origins in an older (and perhaps more commonly known) formulation, namely, that interpretive experience—classically, that of text interpretation—involves us in a circular relation of whole and parts. This formulation derives from antiquity and has a place in the approaches of nineteenth-century figures such as Schleiermacher and Dilthey. On the one hand, it is necessary to understand a text as a whole in order properly to understand any of its parts. On the other hand, however, it is necessary to understand the text in each of its parts in order to understand it as a whole.