Philosophy of Language in the Twentieth Century

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Richard Rorty ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Primary Resource ◽  
Clear Signal

During the first half of the twentieth century philosophy took a ‘linguistic turn’. (The phrase, which comes from Gustav Bergmann, was made famous by Richard Rorty as the title of an anthology of papers in which this development is set out and assessed.) The first clear signal of this development was Ludwig Wittgenstein's remark in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) that ‘All philosophy is “Critique of Language”‘ and this work by Wittgenstein (which is discussed in this article) remains a classic presentation of the thesis that philosophy can only be undertaken through the critical study of language. Thus during the twentieth century philosophical approaches to language, the kinds of theorizing now known as ‘philosophy of language’, have been developed in a context in which language has been taken to be a primary resource for philosophy, and as a result there has been a two-way relationship in which conceptions of language and of philosophy have been developed together.

Metaphilosophical metamorphoses of analytic philosophy of language

Semiotica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tadeusz Szubka
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
First Century ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Current State ◽  
First Philosophy ◽  
New Millennium

Abstract The paper begins with an account of the emergence of analytic philosophy of language in the twentieth century in the context of the development of logic and the linguistic turn. Subsequently, it describes two examples of analytic philosophy of language in its heyday when the discipline was conceived as first philosophy. Finally, it provides, by way of conclusion, a succinct outline of the current state of philosophy of language, marked by modesty and fragmentation. It is claimed that even if one retains optimism about the prospects of philosophy of language in the first century of the new millennium, it would be unreasonable to disagree with the opinion that the present-day philosophy of language is a highly specialized and diversified discipline and no longer so central for philosophical enterprise as it used to be.

Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors.

1969 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
Darwin T. Turner ◽  
Edward Margolies
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
American Authors

scholarly journals The Foucault Effect in Organization Studies

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sverre Raffnsøe ◽  
Andrea Mennicken ◽  
Peter Miller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Organizational Scholarship ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Second Wave

Since the establishment of Organization Studies in 1980, Michel Foucault’s oeuvre has had a remarkable and continuing influence on its field. This article traces the different ways in which organizational scholars have engaged with Foucault’s writings over the past thirty years or so. We identify four overlapping waves of influence. Drawing on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, the first wave focused on the impact of discipline, and techniques of surveillance and subjugation, on organizational practices and power relations. Part of a much wider ‘linguistic’ turn in the second half of the twentieth century, the second wave led to a focus on discourses as intermediaries that condition ways of viewing and acting. This wave drew mainly on Foucault’s early writings on language and discourse. The third wave was inspired by Foucault’s seminal lectures on governmentality towards the end of the 1970s. Here, an important body of international research investigating governmental technologies operating on subjects as free persons in sites such as education, accounting, medicine and psychiatry emerged. The fourth and last wave arose out of a critical engagement with earlier Foucauldian organizational scholarship and sought to develop a more positive conception of subjectivity. This wave draws in particular on Foucault’s work on asceticism and techniques of the self towards the end of his life. Drawing on Deleuze and Butler, the article conceives the Foucault effect in organization studies as an immanent cause and a performative effect. We argue for the need to move beyond the tired dichotomies between discipline and autonomy, compliance and resistance, power and freedom that, at least to some extent, still hamper organization studies. We seek to overcome such dichotomies by further pursuing newly emerging lines of Foucauldian research that investigate processes of organizing, calculating and economizing characterized by a differential structuring of freedom, performative and indirect agency.

Two regimes of the symbolic: radical democracy between Romanticism and structuralism

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-88
Author(s):  
Warren Breckman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Radical Democracy ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Ernesto Laclau ◽  
Constructed Dialogue ◽  
History Of

The ‘symbolic’ has found its way into the heart of contemporary radical democratic theory. When one encounters this term in major theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, our first impulse is to trace its genealogy to the offspring of the linguistic turn, structuralism and poststructuralism. This paper seeks to expose the deeper history of the symbolic in the legacy of Romanticism. It argues that crucial to the concept of the symbolic is a polyvalence that was first theorized in German Romanticism. The linguistic turn that so marked the twentieth century tended to suppress this polyvalence, but it has returned as a crucial dimension of contemporary radical political theory and practice. At stake is more than a recovery of historical depth. Through a constructed dialogue between Romanticism and the thought of both Žižek and Laclau, the paper seeks to provide a sharper appreciation of the resources of the concept of the symbolic.

‘The Ghost of Roger Casement’

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-196
Author(s):  
Alison Garden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Transatlantic Relations ◽  
Close Friend ◽  
Medbh Mcguckian ◽  
Clear Signal ◽  
Enormous Number

The final chapter is concerned with the enormous number of poets that have responded to Casement. Beginning with poetry written by Casement’s close friend and intellectual companion, Eva Gore-Booth, this chapter discusses a range of poetry from throughout the twentieth century. As the chapter illustrates, this poetry depicts Casement in various guises, from the tragic nationalist hero of 1916 in Gore-Booth; to a man wronged and shamed by the British in Yeats’ poems from the late 1930s; to a symbol critiquing regressive U.S. politics and troubled transatlantic relations in Paul Muldoon’s ‘A Clear Signal’. This chapter traces how, throughout the twentieth century, we see poets begin to view the nebulous nature of Casement’s multiple and shifting allegiances as enabling, rather than anxiety inducing, and poets like Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian mobilise Casement as a hopeful symbol of plurality.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 271-284
Author(s):  
Ken Hirschkop
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Richard Rorty ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
The Social ◽  
Second World

The conclusion examines the situation after the Second World War. It shows how the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy ended and how the social democratic settlement in Western Europe gave birth to the new linguistic turns known as structuralism. The author explores the former by examining the career of Richard Rorty and the latter by looking at how Roland Barthes combines ideas from Saussure with a project for a radical analysis of French everyday life in the Mythologies. The book concludes with a review of how the various linguistic turns overinvested in the idea of language.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
John Skorupski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
East European ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Late Modern

This is a critical study of late modern ethical thought in Europe, from the French Revolution to the advent of modernism. I shall take it that ‘late modern’ ethics starts with two revolutions: the political revolution in France and the philosophical revolution of Kant. The contrast is with ‘early modern’. Another contrast is with ‘modernism’, which I shall take to refer to trends in culture, philosophy, and politics that developed in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, and lasted into the twentieth century—perhaps to the sixties, or even to the collapse of East European socialism in the eighties....

Brentano, Franz Clemens (1838–1917)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roderick M. Chisholm ◽  
Peter Simons
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Descriptive Psychology ◽  
Phenomenological Movement ◽  
Precise Statement ◽  
Philosophical Language ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sparse Ontology

Brentano was a philosopher and psychologist who taught at the Universities of Würzburg and Vienna. He made significant contributions to almost every branch of philosophy, notably psychology and philosophy of mind, ontology, ethics and the philosophy of language. He also published several books on the history of philosophy, especially Aristotle, and contended that philosophy proceeds in cycles of advance and decline. He is best known for reintroducing the scholastic concept of intentionality into philosophy and proclaiming it as the characteristic mark of the mental. His teachings, especially those on what he called descriptive psychology, influenced the phenomenological movement in the twentieth century, but because of his concern for precise statement and his sensitivity to the dangers of the undisciplined use of philosophical language, his work also bears affinities to analytic philosophy. His anti-speculative conception of philosophy as a rigorous discipline was furthered by his many brilliant students. Late in life Brentano’s philosophy radically changed: he advocated a sparse ontology of physical and mental things (reism), coupled with a linguistic fictionalism stating that all language purportedly referring to non-things can be replaced by language referring only to things.

Political Language and Political Reality

1985 ◽  
Vol 18 (01) ◽  
pp. 10-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murray Edelman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Social World ◽  
Language Games ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Logical Positivist ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
The Social

The most incisive twentieth century students of language converge from different premises on the conclusion that language is the key creator of the social worlds people experience, and they agree as well that language cannot usefully be understood as a tool for describing an objective reality. For the later Wittgenstein there are no essences, only language games. Chomsky analyzes the sense in which grammar is generative. For Derrida all language is performative, a form of action that undermines its own presuppositions. Foucault sees language as antedating and constructing subjectivity. The “linguistic turn” in twentieth century philosophy, social psychology, and literary theory entails an intellectual ferment that raises fundamental questions about a great deal of mainstream political science, and especially about its logical positivist premises.While the writers just mentioned analyze various senses in which language use is an aspect of creativity, those who focus upon specifically political language are chiefly concerned with its capacity to reflect ideology, mystify, and distort. The more perspicacious of them deny that an undistorting language is possible in a social world marked by inequalities in resources and status, though the notion of an undistorted language can be useful as an evocation of an ideal benchmark. The emphasis upon political language as distorting or mystifying is a key theme in Lasswell and Orwell, as it is in Habermas, Osgood, Ellul, Vygotsky, Enzensberger, Bennett, and Shapiro.

Wittgenstein on Language: From Simples to Samples

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Beaney
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Single Text ◽  
Linguistic Practices

The so-called ‘linguistic turn’ that took place in philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century is most strongly associated with the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). If there is a single text that might be identified as the source of the linguistic turn, then it is Wittgenstein's first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in German in 1921 and in an English translation in 1922. Throughout his work, Wittgenstein was concerned with the foundations of language; the crucial shift lay from the appeal to simples to the appeal to samples, and a corresponding shift from assumptions about what lies hidden to an appreciation of what is visible to all in our linguistic practices. This article first outlines the main elements of Wittgenstein's early conception of language, before considering his critique of that conception and his later views.

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