The final revised version of this article will be published in Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics, edited by Niall Keane and Chris Lawn, Blackwell, 2015. Hermeneutics and Feminist Philosophy Sara Heinämaa University of Jyväskylä Feminist studies and feminist thinking have greatly benefited from the methodological innovations, epistemological insights, and existential-philosophical results of classical hermeneutical thinkers, starting with the works of Schleiermacher and ranging over to the contributions of Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Benjamin, and Ricoeur. The hermeneutical methods of textual interpretation and critical and self-critical inspection are widely used in many areas of contemporary women’s studies and gender studies. We find them applied in feminist theology and religious studies 1 but also in several other areas of the human sciences, for example, ethnography and anthropology, literary studies and art studies, psychology, and psychoanalysis. Moreover, the systematic development of qualitative methods in the social sciences, including techniques of interviewing, ethnomethodology, and discourse analysis, has brought hermeneutical principles to completely new thematic areas and disciplinary contexts. In the field of feminist philosophy, however, hermeneutics is not just a methodological approach, one among many. It is more integral to the whole enterprise serving the critical and self- critical end of making sense of an androcentric tradition, dismantling its biases, and preparing for new beginnings. Applications in Philosophy Hermeneutical methods serve as a common ground for analytical and continental philosophical inquiries. 2 On both sides, feminist philosophers use hermeneutical tools when they approach historical materials in the attempt to make sense of the philosophical problems, methods, and conceptual solutions of past centuries. This work covers all the main topics of feminist philosophy, from knowledge and being to good life, justice, and power. It is relatively easy to detect hermeneutical motifs, for example, in Luce Irigaray’s critical readings of canonical philosophical texts (1974, 1984) or in Michèle Le Dœuff’s constructive accounts of early modern philosophy (1980), but one must not conclude from this that hermeneutics would belong to continental philosophy exclusively. On the contrary, hermeneutical methods and insights prompt feminist investigations also in the fields of analytical philosophy of science,