The history of philosophy is first of all a matter of interpreting texts. But texts, as we know, can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Whoever studies or teaches or writes the history of philosophy uses some interpretive mode, and a first philosophic problem for the history of philosophy is to determine the number and nature of interpretive modes. Since we like to call the art of interpretation hermeneutics, we may call this the problem of hermeneutic modes. This is the problem that we will here address.