Philosophy-of-Language

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. ...

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. ...

Wilfrid Sellars Wilfrid Sellars was one of the most profound and original American analytic philosophers of the twentieth century, though less widely read than his influence would warrant. Trained in a tradition that combined analytic rigor with a deep knowledge of the history of philosophy, he set out to articulate what he called the ultimate aim of philosophy: “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” His work seeks to reconcile a commitment to science and naturalism with recognition of the normative dimension of thought and knowledge. He taught above all at the University of Pittsburgh, where he formed an influential line of students. ...