Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The question of being
- 2 Reading a life
- 3 The unity of Heidegger's thought
- 4 Intentionality and world
- 5 Time and phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger
- 6 Heidegger and the hermeneutic turn
- 7 Death, time, history
- 8 Authenticity, moral values, and psychotherapy
- 9 Heidegger, Buddhism, and deep ecology
- 10 Heidegger and theology
- 11 Heidegger on the connection between nihilism, art, technology, and politics
- 12 Engaged agency and background in Heidegger
- 13 Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the reification of language
- Bibliography
- Index
13 - Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the reification of language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The question of being
- 2 Reading a life
- 3 The unity of Heidegger's thought
- 4 Intentionality and world
- 5 Time and phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger
- 6 Heidegger and the hermeneutic turn
- 7 Death, time, history
- 8 Authenticity, moral values, and psychotherapy
- 9 Heidegger, Buddhism, and deep ecology
- 10 Heidegger and theology
- 11 Heidegger on the connection between nihilism, art, technology, and politics
- 12 Engaged agency and background in Heidegger
- 13 Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the reification of language
- Bibliography
- Index
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.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger , pp. 337 - 357Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993
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