The history of philosophy, perhaps like the history of poetry, has often changed, although not always progressed, as a result of one thinker’s interpretation and criticism of a major precursor. Familiar examples are Aristotle on Plato, Berkeley on Locke, Kant on Hume, Hegel on Kant, and Heidegger on Husserl. Whether the newcomer’s reading of his predecessor is a misreading, and whether misreadings are inevitable, would be difficult to ascertain unless such a judgment were itself absolutely certain. The task confronting a post-structuralist and post-modern theory of reading is to explain misreadings without generating ontological commitments of the same sort that caused previous distortions. One such commitment is the “metaphysical” belief that the current reading has grasped the indubitable truth while the prior misreading erred because it failed to grasp the essence of the matter.
Simon Gros 
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