Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Pragmatism and post-Nietzschean philosophy
- Part I
- Philosophy as science, as metaphor, and as politics
- Heidegger, contingency, and pragmatism
- Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the reification of language
- Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens
- Part II
- Part III
- Index of names
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the reification of language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Pragmatism and post-Nietzschean philosophy
- Part I
- Philosophy as science, as metaphor, and as politics
- Heidegger, contingency, and pragmatism
- Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the reification of language
- Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens
- Part II
- Part III
- Index of names
Summary
What Gustav Bergmann christened “the linguistic turn” was a rather desperate attempt to keep philosophy an armchair discipline. The idea was to mark off a space for a priori knowledge into which neither sociology nor history nor art nor natural science could intrude. It was an attempt to find a substitute for Kant's “transcendental standpoint.” The replacement of “mind” or “experience” by “meaning” was supposed to insure the purity and autonomy of philosophy by providing it with a nonempirical subject matter.
Linguistic philosophy was, however, too honest to survive. When, with the later Wittgenstein, this kind of philosophy turned its attention to the question of how such a “pure” study of language was possible, it realized that it was not possible – that semantics had to be naturalized if it were to be, in Donald Davidson's phrase, “preserved as a serious subject.” The upshot of linguistic philosophy is, I would suggest, Davidson's remark that “there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what philosophers … have supposed. … We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language users master and then apply to cases.” This remark epitomizes what Ian Hacking has called “the death of meaning” – the end of the attempt to make language a transcendental topic.
I take Frege and the early Wittgenstein to be the philosophers primarily responsible for imposing on us the idea that there was such a clearly defined shared structure. In particular, we owe to Wittgenstein the idea that all philosophical problems can in principle be finally solved by exhibiting that structure.
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- Information
- Essays on Heidegger and OthersPhilosophical Papers, pp. 50 - 65Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991
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