Philosophy of Language

For roughly two decades — from the 1950s to the early 1970s — a single idea reorganized the French human sciences and, by extension, much of Western thought: the idea that the most varied human phenomena (language, kinship, myth, fashion, the unconscious, ideology) must be understood as systems of relations — as structures — and not as collections of isolated things, nor as products of an individual consciousness. This was structuralism: less a unified doctrine than a method and an intellectual climate, exported from linguistics to anthropology, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. This article follows that path, from Saussure to his heirs, up to the post-structuralist turn that pushed it to its limit. ...

There is an experience you may already have had in front of a text by Derrida: the feeling that the words keep slipping away, that the argument folds back on itself, that the author seems more interested in unsettling the ground than in building a thesis. That impression is no accident, nor a failure of exposition — it is, in large measure, the point. Derrida did not want to propose a new doctrine of truth or language to add to the long list philosophy has already produced. He wanted to show that the very ambition of fixing a final meaning, full and present to itself, is the fragile presupposition on which the whole Western tradition was built — and that this presupposition does not hold. ...

Few philosophers have written two works so different that one seems to refute the other — and yet have seen both become classics. Ludwig Wittgenstein is the paradigm case. The young man who in 1921 published the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, convinced he had definitively solved the problems of philosophy, is the same man who, three decades later, left in the Philosophical Investigations a meticulous critique of his own early theses. Between the two works lies not only a theoretical turn but one of the most singular intellectual stories of the twentieth century. To understand Wittgenstein is to understand two opposed ways of thinking about what language is and what philosophy can do. ...

Language as a Philosophical Problem Why did language become the central philosophical concern of the twentieth century? Several reasons converge. First, the discovery that many classical philosophical problems resulted from linguistic confusions — misunderstandings about the logical form of propositions. Second, the recognition that understanding how language works is understanding how we think and how we relate to the world. Third, the logical revolution initiated by Frege, which provided rigorous tools for linguistic analysis. ...

Donald Davidson Donald Davidson was one of the most original analytic philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. A professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981, following positions at Stanford, Princeton, and Rockefeller, Davidson constructed a philosophical system remarkable for its internal coherence: his philosophy of mind, theory of action, semantics, and epistemology are closely interconnected, articulated around the themes of events, causation, truth, and interpretation. ...

Ferdinand de Saussure Ferdinand de Saussure (26 November 1857, Geneva — 22 February 1913, Vufflens-le-Château) was a Swiss linguist, regarded as the father of modern linguistics and the theoretical wellspring of twentieth-century structuralism. Trained in the comparative tradition of Leipzig among the Neogrammarians, at the age of 21 he published the Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (1878), in which he postulated, on grounds of pure systemic coherence, “sonant coefficients” whose reality would be confirmed only decades later with the decipherment of Hittite (the laryngeals). He taught in Paris and, from 1891, in Geneva, where he delivered a course in general linguistics three times (1907; 1908–09; 1910–11). He published little in his lifetime; his decisive work is posthumous. ...

Friedrich Schleiermacher Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born in Breslau (present-day Wrocław, Poland) on 21 November 1768 and died in Berlin on 12 February 1834. Son of a Reformed army chaplain, he studied at the Moravian seminary in Barby and subsequently at Halle. He became a preacher in Berlin, held a professorship in Halle (1804–1807), and from 1810 was professor of theology and philosophy at the newly founded University of Berlin — of which he was one of the principal intellectual architects, alongside Wilhelm von Humboldt and Fichte. ...

Giorgio Agamben Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher born in Rome in 1942, professor at the universities of Verona and Venice (IUAV), as well as at various European and American institutions. His work articulates historical-philological analysis, political philosophy, ontology, and theory of language around a genealogical project on the biopolitical paradigm of the West. He is one of the most translated and debated contemporary thinkers. Key Concepts Homo Sacer (Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1995): Revisiting a figure from archaic Roman law, Agamben describes the homo sacer as one who can be killed by anyone without it constituting homicide (occidi), but who cannot be sacrificed (immolari). This figure articulates bare life (nuda vita / zōē) — the mere biological fact of living — excluded from politically qualified life (bíos). ...

Gottlob Frege A German mathematician born in 1848, Gottlob Frege spent almost his entire career as a professor at Jena, in relative obscurity — his genius would be fully recognized only after his death, in 1925, above all thanks to Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle. Today he is regarded as the founder of modern logic and one of the fathers of analytic philosophy. His first great achievement was the creation, in the Begriffsschrift (1879), of a predicate logic that retired the old Aristotelian syllogistic: with quantifiers (“for all,” “there exists”), variables, and functions, Frege gave logic the precision and expressive power it needed to analyze mathematics. His larger aim was logicism — to demonstrate that arithmetic reduces to pure logic. The project, set out in the Basic Laws of Arithmetic, was struck head-on by a letter from Russell (1902) revealing a contradiction in the system; Frege never fully recovered from the blow. ...

Hans-Georg Gadamer German philosopher; principal representative of philosophical hermeneutics in the 20th century. Student of Heidegger; his work Truth and Method (1960) reformulated the problem of understanding as a fundamental philosophical question. Trained at Marburg in the climate of neo-Kantianism, Gadamer found in Heidegger the decisive turn of his career: the analytic of existence showed that understanding is not one intellectual operation among others but the very mode of being of human beings in the world. His early work centered above all on the Platonic dialogue and the dialectical ethics of Plato, and it was only in maturity — when he already held the chair at Heidelberg — that he published the book that would make his name, written when he was already sixty. Living through the Nazi years without joining the Party — though, like many academics, he signed the 1933 professors’ oath of loyalty to the new regime — and surviving two world wars, Gadamer would gain international recognition only in the second half of the century, becoming one of the most long-lived and respected philosophical voices in Europe. ...

Hilary Putnam Hilary Whitehall Putnam was one of the most versatile and intellectually honest philosophers of the twentieth century. Over a career spanning six decades, mostly at Harvard, Putnam pursued an unusual philosophical itinerary: he defended positions that he later criticised with the same energy with which he had established them. He was a functionalist and then rejected functionalism; a scientific realist and then proposed “internal realism”; a sympathiser with logical positivism and then its critic. This willingness for self-criticism is one of the hallmarks of his philosophical style. ...

J.L. Austin John Langshaw Austin (26 March 1911, Lancaster — 8 February 1960, Oxford) was a British philosopher, a central figure of Oxford ordinary language philosophy. White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, he played a distinguished role in British military intelligence during the Second World War. He published little in his lifetime; his decisive works are posthumous, reconstructed from lectures and papers. His style was patient, anti-systematic, and attentive to fine detail: for Austin, “our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing” across many generations — and philosophy should begin by examining them. ...

Jacques Derrida Algerian-French philosopher; founder of deconstruction. He subverted the Western metaphysical tradition by showing that it is structured by hierarchical binary oppositions and by the metaphysics of presence. Born in El-Biar, on the outskirts of Algiers, into a Jewish family, Derrida trained at the École normale supérieure in Paris and began his philosophical path with a meticulous reading of Husserl’s phenomenology. His explosive entry into intellectual debate came in 1966, with the lecture delivered at Johns Hopkins University, in which he questioned the notion of structure as something organized around a stable center — a gesture that distanced him from the then-dominant structuralism and opened what would come to be called post-structuralism. The following year he published, almost simultaneously, three works that fixed his vocabulary and his method, establishing deconstruction not as a doctrine but as a practice of reading attentive to the tensions that each text fails to master. ...

Johann Gottfried Herder Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was born in Mohrungen, East Prussia, the son of a Lutheran schoolteacher and cantor, in a pietist household that shaped his religious sensibility and his lasting interest in language and popular culture. In 1762 he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he attended the lectures of Kant — then a young Privatdozent (an untenured lecturer without a chair), still far from the critical philosophy that would make his name — and formed a decisive friendship with Johann Georg Hamann, who instilled in him a deep suspicion of abstract rationalism and an enduring interest in the relationship between language, thought, and faith. Between 1764 and 1769 he worked as a schoolteacher and pastor in Riga, a cosmopolitan Baltic port that sharpened his interest in the diversity of languages and popular customs. A sea voyage to France in 1769, recorded in the Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1769, and his meeting with the young Goethe in Strasbourg in 1770, drew him into the nascent Sturm und Drang movement. In 1776, at Goethe’s invitation, he took up the post of general superintendent (court preacher) in Weimar, where he remained until his death in 1803, forming with Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland the circle later known as Weimar Classicism. ...

John Searle John Rogers Searle, born in Denver (Colorado) in 1932 and died in 2025, was Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His contributions span philosophy of language (speech act theory), philosophy of mind (the Chinese Room argument, biological naturalism), and social ontology (the construction of institutional reality). He is one of the most widely read and debated analytic philosophers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Key Concepts Speech Act Theory (Speech Acts, 1969): Developing J.L. Austin, Searle systematises the theory. Every speech act involves: ...

Jürgen Habermas Born in 1929 in Germany, and marked in his youth by the experience of Nazism and the postwar period, Jürgen Habermas became the leading name of the second generation of the Frankfurt School and one of the most influential philosophers of recent decades (he died in 2026). An assistant to Adorno, he inherited the tradition of Critical Theory but rejected its pessimism: where Horkheimer and Adorno saw modern reason degenerate into sheer domination, Habermas sought to recover an emancipatory potential within reason itself. ...

Ludwig Wittgenstein Born in Vienna in 1889, into one of the wealthiest and most cultured families of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ludwig Wittgenstein began by studying aeronautical engineering, but reflection on the foundations of mathematics led him to logic and from there to Cambridge, to study with Bertrand Russell. His biography is as singular as his thought: he fought in the First World War, gave away his inherited fortune, worked as a village schoolteacher, a gardener, and even an architect, before returning to academic philosophy. He is the most influential figure in twentieth-century analytic philosophy — and, very rarely, the author of two distinct and equally decisive philosophies, both centered on language. ...

Mikhail Bakhtin Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (16 November 1895, Oryol — 7 March 1975, Moscow) was a philosopher of language and a theorist of literature and culture. Marginalized and almost unknown during his lifetime in the Soviet Union — arrested and sent into exile in 1929, he taught for decades at provincial universities — he was rediscovered from the 1960s onward and became one of the most influential Russian thinkers in the world across the humanities. He was the center of the so-called Bakhtin Circle, which also included Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (the authorship of some works signed by them is a matter of scholarly debate). ...

Paul Ricoeur French philosopher, one of the greatest hermeneuticians of the 20th century. He synthesized Husserl’s phenomenology with Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and analytic philosophy of action. His work traverses the conflict of interpretations, the theory of narrative, and the ethics of the self. Key Concepts Hermeneutics of suspicion vs. of trust: two great interpretive traditions — that of suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud — texts conceal something) and that of trust (the religious and poetic tradition — texts reveal something). Mature hermeneutics oscillates between the two Narrative identity (identité narrative): personal identity is not a fixed substance but is narratively constructed — we are the characters of the stories we tell about ourselves (idem vs. ipse: identity as sameness vs. selfhood) Time and narrative: human time only becomes comprehensible when narrated — narrative (historiography and fiction) configures temporal experience and gives it meaning (mimesis in three phases: prefiguration, configuration, refiguration) Living metaphor: metaphor is not merely a rhetorical ornament — it creates new meanings by bringing distant semantic fields together; it “redescribes reality” Conflict of interpretations: there is no neutral interpretation — every reading involves a position; hermeneutics must assume the conflict between perspectives rather than eliminating it Oneself as another (soi-même comme un autre): selfhood (who I am) is always mediated by the other — alterity constitutes the self; a proposal for an ethics of solicitude and justice Little ethics: “aiming at the good life, with and for others, in just institutions” — articulating the ethical perspective (teleological) with the moral perspective (deontological) Influenced by Husserl and Heidegger — phenomenology Gadamer — philosophical hermeneutics Freud — psychoanalysis and suspicion Marx and Nietzsche — hermeneutics of suspicion Analytic philosophy of action (Austin, Strawson) Influenced Narrative and biblical theology Philosophy of law and legal hermeneutics Historiography and philosophy of history Habermas — ethics and communication Works Philosophy of the Will (1950–60); Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965); The Conflict of Interpretations (1969); The Rule of Metaphor (1975); Time and Narrative (3 vols., 1983–85); Oneself as Another (1990); Memory, History, Forgetting (2000). ...

Rudolf Carnap Rudolf Carnap was the most systematic and influential figure of the Vienna Circle and of logical empiricism, a movement that sought to refound philosophy on the rigor of modern logic and fidelity to experience. Trained in physics, logic, and philosophy in Germany, he studied with Gottlob Frege at Jena before joining the Vienna Circle in the 1920s. With the rise of Nazism he emigrated to the United States, where he taught at Chicago and at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work spans the logical construction of knowledge, the syntax and semantics of language, the theory of confirmation, and inductive logic, always guided by the ideal of conceptual clarity. ...