II. Early German Philosophy of Language

1975 ◽  
pp. 23-43



Author(s):  
Erin McKenna ◽  
Scott L. Pratt

Philosophy of language—the dominant philosophy of the American academy—is central to the rise of Donald Trump. To philosophers, this claim may seem as surprising as Trump’s presidency. Neither would have surprised John Dewey. In German Philosophy and Politics (1915), Dewey claimed that World War I was inevitable thanks to the Kantian philosophical commitments that informed German culture, such as the separation of reason from experience and an absolute sense of duty. In the 1943 edition, Dewey argued that Hitler’s rise and World War II depended on these same commitments. German philosophy was a mirror of German culture that provided a “definitely practical aid” in realizing the ends it reflected. Today, the mirror of American culture is the philosophy of the linguistic turn exemplified by the work of Robert Brandom. This chapter considers this link and argues for a recovery of a Deweyan pluralist philosophy of resistance and freedom.



Author(s):  
James McElvenny

This book is a historical study of influential currents in the philosophy of language and linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century, explored from the perspective of the English scholar C. K. Ogden (1889–1957). Although no ‘Great Man’ in his own right, Ogden had a personal connection, reflected in his work, to several of the most significant figures of the age. The background to the ideas espoused in Ogden’s book The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored with I.A. Richards (1893–1979), is examined in detail, along with the application of these ideas in his international language project Basic English. A richly interlaced network of connections is revealed between early analytic philosophy, semiotics and linguistics, all inevitably shaped by the contemporary cultural and political environment. In particular, significant interaction is shown between Ogden’s ideas, the varying versions of ‘logical atomism’ of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and Ludwig Wittgensten (1889–1951), Victoria Lady Welby’s (1837–1912) ‘significs’, and the philosophy and political activism of Otto Neurath (1882–1945) and Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) of the Vienna Circle. Amid these interactions emerges a previously little known mutual exchange between the academic philosophy and linguistics of the period and the practically oriented efforts of the international language movement.



Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. However, it has played no real role in philosophical semantics, which is surprising. This is the first book to examine through a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection—about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. This book maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results—directed content—is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. The book represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language.



2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-65
Author(s):  
Birgit Sandkaulen

The question of the relationship between faith and reason marks one of the fundamental issues for classical German philosophy. The paper is guided by a systematic interest in identifying some common features in the approaches taken by Kant and Hegel that are also of interest for the contemporary discussion: 1. The specific modernity of Kant’s and Hegel’s considerations, evident in their rejection of the resources traditionally appealed to by religion and rationalist metaphysics; 2. the anti-naturalist conviction that, in contrast to animals, a metaphysical dimension is inscribed into the human mind; and 3. the thesis that metaphysical questions are existential questions arising from an impulse toward freedom, and hence that a purely theoretical approach is inadequate to address them.



2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (152) ◽  
pp. 141-145
Author(s):  
L. A. Checal ◽  

This study focuses on a conceptual representation of the metaphysical and non-classical context of reflection in its subjective dichotomous understanding. The author successively reviews the specifics of reflection, as well as the features of methodology of cognition and self-knowledge in the context of determining the values and priorities of human development and consciousness. The article also includes an overview of the main categories of reflection through a breakdown of theoretical relationships and the most important conceptual discourses. The theoretical significance of the problem of cognition and self-knowledge is determined by the central role of man in society and history. The analysis shows that the methodology of cognition and self-knowledge should be based on the principles of axiological disengagement, a combination of logical and historical aspect, as well as on the coherence of theory and practice.



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