This tidy volume is useful for the scholar of post-renaissance poetics, philosophy, or philology as an introduction to one line of thinking on these matters: the German tradition of hermeneutics, from which whole academic disciplines and intellectual approaches (philosophical hermeneutics, deconstruction...) has arisen.

The selections provided give the careful reader a taste of how certain themes such as understanding and interpretation have developed in dialogue with (or in some cases outright imitation of) other conceptions of the same themes. Dilthey's ideas, for example, become much more pregnant with significance when the reader is reminded of Schleiermacher before and Heidegger after. It's striking to me at least how indebted twentieth-century thinkers such as Bakhtin and Wittgenstein are to Dilthey and friends--so these pages are still relevant and contemporary in many ways.

The introduction and bibliographies are also complete and as far as I can tell comprehensive.

Yes, yes. I hope this is helpful.