The aim of this chapter is to show the ethical implications of hermeneutics. While hermeneutics, in its plural historical foundations, has remained predominantly a set of disciplines with a gnoseological focus, it has never lost its ethical horizon insofar as it is fundamentally open to the otherness of the other, to its historical or cultural strangeness. This is true of ancient philology as well as of modern philology, which seek to overcome the strangeness and obscurity of texts from Greco-Latin antiquity. The very ambition of translation bears witness, as Ricoeur reminds us, to a model of hospitality (“linguistic hospitality”) in which the language of the other is welcomed into one’s own language. This is the same ethical horizon that one can see at work among the founders of modern hermeneutics, from Schleiermacher to Dilthey. The psychological model of understanding the expressions of others that underpins philological and historical understanding is not just a “theoretical” and “gnoseological” model that presents itself as a theory of knowledge. It is also an ethical model for welcoming others whom I do not understand well or enough, due to their historical, cultural and linguistic distance.