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9 - Language

from IV - Mind, Language, and Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

By
Michael N. Forster
Edited by
Allen W. Wood  and
Songsuk Susan Hahn
Allen W. Wood
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Songsuk Susan Hahn
Affiliation:
Université Concordia, Montréal, Québec
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Summary

This chapter focuses on nineteenth-century philosophy of language, conceived broadly in chronology but more narrowly in theme (for the most part, developments that occurred in such closely related fields as linguistics and formal logic have been bracketed out).

Nineteenth-century philosophy of language emerged from the background of a revolution in thinking about the subject that had taken place in eighteenth-century Germany, overturning standard Enlightenment preconceptions. Herder (1744–1803) and to a lesser extent Hamann (1730–88) were the main protagonists of this revolution. Among the revolutionary principles they championed, the following are most important:

  1. Thought is essentially dependent on and bounded by language – that is, one can only think if one has a language, and one can only think what one can express linguistically. (Let us call this the thought-language principle.)

  2. Meanings or concepts consist, not in the sorts of items, in principle independent of language, with which much of the philosophical tradition has equated them – for example, referents, Platonic forms, or the mental “ideas” favored by the British Empiricists and others – but in word-usages. (Let us call this the meaning-usage principle.)

  3. Meanings or concepts are of their very nature based in (perceptual and affective) sensations – though this grounding can involve metaphorical extensions, and in the case of human beings a converse dependence (of sensations on concepts) holds as well. (Let us call this the meaning-sensation principle.)

  4. Reference to particulars is never direct but is always mediated by general concepts, or “universals.” (Let us call this the principle of indirect reference.)

  5. Mankind exhibits deep linguistic and conceptual-intellectual diversities, especially between different historical periods and cultures, but even to some extent between individuals living within a single period and culture. (Let us call this the diversity principle.)

  6. Language – and hence also thought, human mental life more generally, and indeed the very self – is fundamentally social in nature. (Let us call this the language-sociality principle.)

  7. Metaphysical philosophy is largely the product of confusions about language – in particular, disregard of principles (1), (2), and (3). (Let us call this the principle of metaphysics as linguistic confusion.)

  8. …

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The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (1790–1870) , pp. 263 - 292
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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References

Johann Gottfried von Herder [1744–1803] and Johann Georg Hamann [1730–88]: Herder: Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. M. N. Forster (Cambridge, 2002); Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man [= Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity], trans. T. Churchhill (London, 1800)]. Hamann: Writings on Philosophy and Language, ed. and trans. K. Haynes (Cambridge, 2007). I. Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London, 1976); The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (London, 1993). M. N. Forster, “Johann Gottfried von Herder,” in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ; “Herder’s Philosophy of Language, Interpretation, and Translation: Three Fundamental Principles,” Review of Metaphysics 56 (2002): 323–55; “Gods, Animals, and Artists: Some Problem Cases in Herder’s Philosophy of Language,” Inquiry 46 (2003): 65–96; “Herder’s Importance as a Philosopher,” in Von der Logik zur Sprache, eds. R. Bubner and G. Hindrichs (Stuttgart, 2007); After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford, 2010) (this volume contains versions of the preceding essays as well as other essays relevant to the present chapter). I. Hacking, “How, Why, When, and Where Did Language Go Public?” in Readings after Foucault, ed. R. S. Leventhal (Detroit, 1994). C. Taylor, “The Importance of Herder,” in Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration, eds. E. Margalit and A. Margalit (Chicago, 1991); “Language and Human Nature,” in C. Taylor, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1996).
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel [1770–1831]: Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1977). T. Bodammer, Hegels Deutung der Sprache (Hamburg, 1969). D. J. Cook, Language in the Philosophy of Hegel (The Hague, 1973). J. Derrida, “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology,” in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago, 1982). M. N. Forster, Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit (Chicago, 1998); “Hegel and Some (Near-)Contemporaries: Narrow or Broad Expressivism?” in Das Interesse des Denkens: Hegel aus heutiger Sicht, eds. W. Welsch and K. Vieweg (Munich, 2003); “Hegel and Hermeneutics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. F. C. Beiser (Cambridge, 2009); German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond (Oxford, 2011) (this volume contains versions of the preceding essays as well as other essays relevant to the present chapter). S. Hahn, “Hegel on Saying and Showing,” Journal of Value Inquiry 28 (1994): 151–68. M. J. Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford, 1992).
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher [1768–1834]: Hermeneutics and Criticism, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. A. Bowie (Cambridge, 1998); Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, eds. and trans. J. Duke and J. Forstman (Atlanta, 1986); “On the Different Methods of Translation,” in German Romantic Criticism, ed. A. L. Willson (New York, 1982). A. Berman, L’épreuve de l’étranger: Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique: Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin (Les Essais) (Paris, 1984) (for Schleiermacher’s theory of translation). A. Boeckh, Enzyklopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften (1877, reprint Darmstadt, 1966). M. N. Forster, “Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ; “Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics: Some Problems and Solutions,” Harvard Review of Philosophy 13 (2005): 100–22; After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford, 2010). M. Frank, Das individuelle Allgemeine (Frankfurt, 1977); Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare (Frankfurt, 1990). R. E. Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston, Ill., 1969), especially chap. 7.
Friedrich Schlegel [1772–1829]: Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, eds. E. Behler et al. (Munich, 1958–), especially vol. 8 for On the Language and the Wisdom of the Indians; Philosophical Fragments, trans. P. Firchow (Minneapolis, 1991) (contains the “Athenaeum Fragments”); J. M. Bernstein, ed., Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2003) (contains “On Goethe’s Meister” and “On Incomprehensibility”); “Friedrich Schlegels ‘Philosophie der Philologie’ mit einer Einleitung herausgegeben von Josef Körner,” Logos 17 (1928): 1–72. E. Fiesel, Die Sprachphilosophie der deutschen Romantik (Tübingen, 1927). M. N. Forster, German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond (Oxford, 2011). H. Nüsse, Die Sprachtheorie Friedrich Schlegels (Heidelberg, 1962). H. Patsch, “Friedrich Schlegels ‘Philosophie der Philologie’ und Schleiermachers frühe Entwürfe zur Hermeneutik,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 63 (1966): 434–72. P. Szondi, “Friedrich Schlegel’s Theory of Poetical Genres: A Reconstruction from the Posthumous Fragments,” in P. Szondi, On Textual Understanding and Other Essays (Manchester, 1986).
Wilhelm von Humboldt [1767–1835]: On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, trans. P. Heath (Cambridge, 1989); Essays on Language, ed. T. Harden and D. Farrelly (Frankfurt, 1997) (includes “On the Dual Form” and “On the Language of the South Sea Islands”); A. Lefevere, ed., Translation/History/Culture (London, 1992) (contains part of Humboldt’s introduction to his translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon on translation theory). H. Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure (Minneapolis, 1982), and his introduction to Humboldt’s On Language (for a stimulating but eccentric attempt to trace all of Humboldt’s main ideas back to French sources). E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, Conn., 1955), vol. 1, chap. 1. M. N. Forster, German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond (Oxford, 2011). H. Gipper, Wilhelm von Humboldts Bedeutung für Theorie und Praxis moderner Sprachforschung (Münster, 1992). H. Gipper and P. Schmitter, Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachphilosophie im Zeitalter der Romantik (Tübingen, 1985) (this volume also discusses several of the other figures treated in this chapter). R. Haym, Wilhelm von Humboldt: Lebensbild und Charakteristik (Berlin, 1856), especially bk. 4, first half. J. Trabant, Apeliotes oder der Sinn der Sprache: Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprachbild (Berlin, 1986).
The development of nineteenth-century linguistics generally: M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1970), chap. 8. H. Gipper and P. Schmitter, Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachphilosophie im Zeitalter der Romantik (Tübingen, 1985). H. Pedersen, The Discovery of Language: Linguistic Science in the 19th Century (Bloomington, Ind., 1962).
O. F. Gruppe [1804–76]: Antäus: Ein Briefwechsel über spekulative Philosophie in ihrem Konflikt mit Wissenschaft und Sprache (Berlin, 1831); Wendepunkt der Philosophie im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1834); Gegenwart und Zukunft der Philosophie in Deutschland (Berlin, 1855). H. D. Sluga, Gottlob Frege (London, 1980), especially 19–26.
Friedrich Nietzsche [1844–1900]: “On the Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. and trans. D. Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1979) (Breazeale’s introduction is also helpful); Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, eds. and trans. S. L. Gilman, C. Blair, and D. J. Parent (Oxford, 1989); The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York, 1967); The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York, 1974); Beyond Good and Evil, ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann (New York, 1966); The Will to Power, eds. and trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York, 1967). M. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1990), especially chap. 3. A. C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York, 1965).
Fritz Mauthner [1849–1923]: Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Stuttgart, 1902; reprint of 3rd ed., Hildesheim, 1967); Die Sprache (Frankfurt, 1906); Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Munich, 1910). A. Janik and S. Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York, 1973), especially 121–33. H. D. Sluga, Gottlob Frege (London, 1980), especially 74–6, 183–6. G. Weiler, “Mauthner, Fritz,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. P. Edwards (New York, 1972); Mauthner’s Critique of Language (Cambridge, 1970).
John Stuart Mill [1806–73]: A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson, vol. 7 (Toronto, 1973).
Gottlob Frege [1848–1925]: Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, ed. B. F. McGuinness (Oxford, 1984); The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin (Evanston, Ill., 1980). G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Frege: Logical Excavations (Oxford, 1984). S. Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford, 1984). M. Dummett, “Frege, Gottlob,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. P. Edwards (New York, 1972); Frege: Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, Mass., 1981); The Interpretation of Frege’s Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1981); Frege and Other Philosophers (Oxford, 1991). A. Kenny, Frege (London, 1995). S. A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford, 1980). H. D. Sluga, Gottlob Frege (London, 1980). J. Weiner, Frege in Perspective (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990); “Has Frege a Philosophy of Language?” in Early Analytic Philosophy: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, ed. W. W. Tait (Chicago, 1997).
Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889–1951]: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (1921; London, 1961); Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (1953; 2nd rev. ed., Oxford, 1958). R. J. Fogelin, Wittgenstein (London, 1976). P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Bristol, 1997).
Blackburn, Simon in Spreading the Word (1984)

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