(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)Following the death of Paul Ricoeur, the scholarly assimilation of his last writings, the diligent archival work of the Fonds Ricoeur, and reflection on some heated political controversies that caught Ricoeur up late in life, we are now in a renewed period of assessment of his body of work as it affects hermeneutics. As a part of this process of reassessment, Jean Grondin gave a speech to the Ricoeur Society at Montreal in 2010 and published a paper with the same title, From Gadamer to Ricoeur: Can One Speak of a Common Understanding of Hermeneutics? A careful reading shows that Grondin gave a negative answer to this question. He believes that the two thinkers came to hermeneutics separately along very different paths, and that they described two markedly different programs. Of the seven major that he outlines, some may not reconcile. To me this is a bracing judgment, coming as it does in the wake of some ameliorative assessments that paint a picture of basic accord. Gary Madison's synoptic overview of the two hermeneuts, for instance, argued that the two thinkers offer differences not so much in substance, perhaps, as in what they choose to accentuate.11 will argue that such a harmony is a confusion that would be deleterious to hermeneutics going forward, because it would let serious issues go unaddressed, and I am heartened that Grondin does not make that mistake.2 Despite the graceful and diplomatic tone of his essay, he builds some constructive footholds for developing and clarifying serious issues of difference that need our attention.31 am going to continue along his path of discrimination by doing two things: first, I will aggregate Grondin's seven points into what I think are the two fundamental differences, and then I will elaborate on these two to show the challenge they pose for hermeneutics going forward. The tenor of Grondin's call for dialogue between Ricoeurian and Gadamerian scholars is implicitly a plea to start thinking about what a common hermeneutics might look like, so this is what I am setting out to do.First difference. Grondin starts by locating a difference in the angle of projection of the two projects at their origin, a subtle difference that will have profound consequences as the projects widen out on their respective trajectories. He frames this initial difference in terms of fundamental questions: Because Ricoeur approaches hermeneutics as an ontological radicalization of methods of textual interpretation, he believes its question is, How do we interpret? Such a query looks for the mechanisms of discursive identity that arise out of historical distance from the immediate purposes and context the inscription creates. Gadamer seeks in hermeneutics an explanation for the essentially linguistic (sprachliche) condition of human beings in the world (notre rapport au monde), and so his question is,What happens when we come to an understanding?4 This tack places the focus of hermeneutics on the Gestalt of grounded communicative interaction as it plays out-the relation of the speakers and listeners to the issue, to each other, and to the world in a constantly adjusting network of reciprocal interrelations. Historical distance is in effect the medium of belonging. By putting the matter in this way, Gadamer jumps up a metaphorical level from the text-reader relationship to the discourse-world relationship. Although Ricoeur certainly follows out the ontological consequences of textual distance, he does not make this metaphorical leap.Because of the consequences that will flow from these starting points, it is important to ask why the two thinkers set out with these different orientations. As a French philosopher more directly in the line of the reflective tradition, Ricoeur's question is rooted in the methodological preoccupations of sixteenthand seventeenth-century scholars who sought rigorous principles for interpreting the objects of human creation as distinct from the objects of natural science. …