The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 51 pptx

and validity of prophetic, inspirational, as well as esoteric and fantastic knowledge. h.z. Mehdi Ha’iri Yazdi, The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philoso- phy: Knowledge by Presence (Albany, NY, 1992). Komensky´ (Comenius), Jan Amos (1592–1670). Czech philosopher and pedagogue. Bishop and theologian of the Unitas Fratrum (Moravian Brethren), exiled in the period of Counter-Reformation. He found refuge in various parts of Europe, including London, where he wrote the mystic- ally coloured Via Lucis (1641). His principal philosophical treatise De Rerum Humanarum Emendatione Consultatio Catholica is based on the traditional Neoplatonic scheme of emanations specifically modified and enriched by the humanistic idea of restoration of humans to the divine universal harmony by the way of universal reform (panorthosia) and universal education (pampaedia). So con- ceived, his philosophy aimed at a grandiose reform of peda- gogy in the spirit of modern didactic realism. In place of scholastic verbalism it turned to demonstrative teaching, conceiving school as play (schola ludus) and as a workshop of humanity (officina humanitatis). The same principles gave birth to his philosophy of non-violence, peace, and ecumenicity. ‘Omnia sponte fluant, absit violentia rebus’ became his device. m.p. v.s. J. Patocˇka, Jan Amos Komensky´: Gesammelte Schriften zur Comenius- forschung (Bochum, 1981). Korean philosophy. The reigning theme of Korean phil- osophy is irenic fusionism, as evidenced by the way of the flow of wind (poong-ryu-do) that is the substratum of Korean philosophy. The flow of wind is invisible and yet all-pervasive. This is also man’s vibrating, unceasing way of communing with nature and fellow beings, thus evinc- ing an ‘undifferentiated aesthetic continuum’ (to adopt F. S. C. Northrop’s phrase) or Nothingness (mu). Poong-ryu-do is the way of overcoming alienation, coun- tenancing solidarity with fellow beings, and helping to achieve harmony of polarities. When *Confucianism, Buddhism, *Taoism, and other ‘foreign’ strands of thought were introduced to Korea, it was poong-ryu-do that helped to bring about their fusion and synthesis. I will illustrate the theme with two notable examples. Attuned to poong-ryu-do was the Buddhist monk Wonhyo (617–86). If Buddhism originated in India and was nurtured in China in Maha¯ya¯na form, it was segmented into various sects when it reached Korea. Wonhyo suc- ceeded in integrating the contentions of these sects by Harmonizing of Contentions (hwajaeng): just as all rivers are bound for the sea, so are various sects bound to return to the Buddha mind. For Wonhyo, to attain Nirvana was to attain one heart–mind–body (ilshimdongchae) with humanity. Paradoxically, for Wonhyo, to be exclusively Buddhist was not to be Buddhist. He propounded an all- encompassing cosmic universalism by absorbing elements not only of Buddhism but also of Confucianism and Taoism. Wonhyo was the embodiment of the fusion of the three teachings (shilnaepohamsamkyo) and the way of mysterious wondrousness (hyunmyochido). He endeav- oured to overcome the dichotomies of being and non- being, the true and the false, and the sacred and the secular. For Wonhyo, Nothingness (mu) meant integra- tion, fusion, and harmony, and getting away from dogma. His mu was the prototype of the Zen Buddhist notion of Absolute Negation and Nothingness. The theme of harmony, fusion, and synthesis is again manifest in Korean *neo-Confucianism. In dealing with the metaphysical (i) and the physical (ki), the Chinese philosopher Chu Hsi (1130–1200) was dualistic and said that the Four Beginnings (commiseration, shame, defer- ence, and discernment) of the Four Virtues (humanity, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom) emanate from i and the Seven Emotions ( joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, hatred, and desire) from ki. The Korean philosopher Hwadam (Suh Kyungduk, 1489–1546) moved to integrate i and ki and spoke of Great Harmony (taehwa). In the Four–Seven Debate with Ki Daesung, Toegye (Yi Hwang, 1501–70), while being still dualistic, broke away from Chu Hsi by espousing the reciprocal emanation (hobal) of i and ki: with the Four, ki follows i when i becomes emanant; with the Seven, when ki becomes emanant, i ‘rides’ ki. Though he was critical of Toegye’s idea that ki fol- lows i as being dualistic, Yulgok (Yi I, 1536–84) nevertheless embraced his notion that i ‘rides’ ki: only ki is emanant and i moves its emanation; iandkiare ‘neither two things nor one thing’, as evidenced by ‘wondrous fusion’ (myohap). For Yulgok, original nature (i) and physical nature (ki) coalesce into one human nature. Toegye and Yulgok, whose thoughts culminated in an irenic fusionism, constituted the crowning phase of East Asian neo-Confucianism by exhibit- ing dialectical dexterity in articulating the concepts of i and ki, left unclarified by the Chinese. Toegye also developed the neo-Confucianist concept of single-mindedness (kyung), which was a manifestation of his unequivocal humanism, as shown by his total rejec- tion of the Mandate of Heaven (chunmyung), which still had a hold on the Chinese, including Chu Hsi. Toegye’s kyung synthesized the primeval Korean sense of supreme- efforts-cum-earnest-devotion (chisung) with the Confu- cianist notion of holding fast to mind ( jik-yung); he advocated self-efforts for creating a meaningful life. In par- ticular, his concept of single-mindedness had a lasting influence on the Japanese neo-Confucianists of the Toku- gawa period. Every major Korean neo-Confucianist shared Toegye’s preoccupation with single-mindedness, which signalled new stress on praxis in the development of Korean neo- Confucianism: the fusion of the metaphysical and the physical is better brought about through action than specu- lation, important as theory might be. That was the point of Yulgok’s integration of sincerity (sung) with single- mindedness. In this respect Korean neo-Confucianism made a break with the Cheng-Chu school of Chinese neo-Confucianism, which was overly speculative. 480 knowledge by presence It is small wonder that Yulgok’s thought flowered into Practical Learning (shilhak) in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Korea. Practical Learning, keener on social issues than idle speculation, once more evinced the way of the flow of wind in striving to achieve the synthesis of theory and praxis. Practical Learning also helped to create an intellectual ambience open and receptive to Western Learning (suhak). k s.l. *Buddhist philosophy. W. T. de Bary and J. K. Haboush (eds.), The Rise of New- Confucianism in Korea (New York, 1985). International Cultural Foundation (ed.), Korean Thought (Seoul, 1982). Korn, Alejandro (1860–1936). Latin American philosopher born in San Vicente, Argentina. Korn’s reading of Kant and Schopenhauer led him to move away from *positivism, the predominant philosophy of Latin America in the late nine- teenth century. Like the positivists, however, he main- tained that knowledge must be based on experience. But philosophy must not be reduced to a science of empirical facts; it is fundamentally concerned with values. In La libertad creadora (1920–2), he proposed a creative concept of *free- dom according to which the goal of human actions is to overcome the laws of necessity that govern the objective world. Creative impulse, as manifested in self-control and the technological conquest of nature, enable the subject to accomplish this. In Axiología (1930), his most important work, Korn defends a subjectivist position, where value is understood as relative to human evaluation. e.m. j.g. Solomon Lipp, Three Argentine Thinkers (New York, 1969). Korsgaard, Christine (1952– ). American philosopher, Professor at Harvard. Korsgaard is one of the leading interpreters of *Kant’s moral philosophy and exponents of contemporary Kantian ethics. In her book The Sources of Normativity she argues, first, that our reflective nature forces us to look for reasons for our actions, and second, that we find these reasons in our own autonomous nature. The theory is realist, but does not involve metaphysical commitments. Korsgaard argues that in order to act at all we must have a conception of our own practical identity, and that compatibility with this conception is what deter- mines whether a consideration counts a reason. Though Korsgaard admits that we can have many overlapping identities (as a mother, as a philosopher, as a friend), she argues that there is one identity that we must all have— identity simply as a human being among other human beings, and this is the identity that gives rise to traditional Kantian moral reasons. e.j.m. *constructivism. C. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, 1996). —— Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge, 1996). Kotarbin´ski, Tadeusz (1886–1981). Polish philosopher and logician, author of a radically nominalist epistemology. Studied in Darmstadt and Lvov, taught classical languages in high schools, was professor at the Universities of War- saw, Lodz, and then Warsaw again. He was President of the Polish Academy of Science from 1957 to 1962. He published a widely used textbook, Elements of the Theory of Knowledge, Formal Logic and Methodology of Science (1929, in Polish), a number of works on ethics that are independent of religious and political premisses and of the laws of nature (Meditations on Worthy Life (1966), in Pol- ish), various historical studies, and studies on praxiology or the general theory of efficient work (Treatise on Efficient Work (1955), in Polish). His own metaphysical standpoint he described as reism, a kind of *materialism without mat- ter; it implies that the proper use of the verb ‘to exist’ is reserved to individual things and that all meaningful propositions (including those related to mathematical objects, literary works, cognitive acts, etc.) can, in prin- ciple, be translated into reistic language; without being thus translatable they are meaningless. Both before and after the Second World War Kotarbin´ski was regarded in Poland as a moral authority, engaged in fighting for toler- ance against clericalism and anti-Semitism. l.k. H. Skolimowski, Polish Analytical Philosophy (London, 1967). Kraus, Karl (1874–1936). Viennese playwright, poet, and satirist, best known as publisher of Die Fackel (The Torch), a fiercely independent journal of social, political, and cul- tural criticism that created a sensation when it first appeared in 1899. Die Fackel was admired by many, includ- ing Wittgenstein. An uncompromising opponent of any- thing he judged to be humbug, Kraus considered *language an important source of truth in its own right, and vigorously attacked any individual or institution, most particularly the Press, that he regarded as corrupting language and thus contributing to the hypocrisy and moral decline of the age. Kraus’s scathing satirical attacks on the political and cultural institutions which he took to be responsible for the First World War culminated in an epic drama, The Last Days of Mankind, composed largely of quotations he allowed, characteristically, to speak for themselves. j.heil E. Timms, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist (New Haven, Conn., 1986). Kreisel, Georg (1923– ). Austrian and cosmopolitan logi- cian. As a mathematician he has chiefly studied proof and computation. Though not the founder of a school, he has had a wide influence in philosophy of mathematics through his many commentaries. Recurring themes in his writings are that ‘the data of foundations consist of the mathematical experience of the working mathematician’; that foundational slogans (particularly formalist ones) can usually be proved wrong by careful attention to straight- forward facts; that classical and constructivist mathemat- ics each use the appropriate methods to describe different parts of the same world (respectively, mathematical objects and mathematical evidence); that the proof of a theorem may give extra information which is important Kreisel, Georg 481 for understanding the role of the theorem; and that in mathematics one should cultivate a sense of when to be surprised. w.a.h. *constructivism; formalism. Georg Kreisel, ‘Mathematical Logic: What has it Done for the Philosophy of Mathematics?’, in R. Schoenman (ed.), Bertrand Russell: Philosopher of the Century (London, 1967). Kripke, Saul (1940– ). American logician and philosopher of language noted for his work in *modal logic but also for his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s views on meaning. Exploiting the terminology of *possible worlds, Kripke argues against descriptivist theories of proper *names, holding instead that proper names are *rigid designators, that is, expressions which (unlike most definite descrip- tions) retain the same reference in every world in which they refer to anything at all. He repudiates Frege’s theory that proper names possess senses determining which objects they refer to, arguing instead that names are initially assigned their references by procedures such as ostension and are then passed on from speaker to speaker in a causal chain, each speaker receiving the name with an intention to use it to refer to the same object as that to which the speaker from which he received it referred. Kripke appeals to the rigidity of names to defend the metaphysical theses of the necessity of identity and of ori- gin, the latter implying that a composite object could not have been originally composed of parts very different in identity or kind from those from which it was in fact made. His defence of these theses leads him to reject the trad- itional association between *necessity and the *a priori and to hold that some necessary truths can be a posteriori and some contingent ones a priori. For instance, that water is H 2 O is a true identity statement whose truth was dis- covered only empirically and yet one which is, if Kripke is right, necessary. As a putative example of a contingent a priori truth he cites the statement that the standard metre bar is one metre in length. Kripke’s stance on such issues has far-reaching metaphysical implications, as is demonstrated by his appeal to the necessity of identity to challenge the coherence of mind–brain *identity theories. e.j.l. C. Hughes, Kripke: Names, Necessity, and Identity (Oxford, 2004). S. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford, 1980). —— Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Oxford, 1982). Kristeva, Julia (1941– ). French theorist, linguist, literary critic, and philosopher, currently a psychoanalyst. Born in Bulgaria but based in Paris since the mid-1960s, she brought Marxist theory and Russian formalism together with *structuralism and *psychoanalysis to produce an eclectic interdisciplinary approach to questions concern- ing subjectivity. This approach has distinguished all her subsequent work. Initially working with Derrida and others in the intellectual group Tel Quel, her theoretical exploration of literary texts, creativity, and language acquisition has broadened to include relevant political, sexual, philosophical, and linguistic issues. Some of her work has been in *feminist philosophy, some in aesthetics, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis. a.c.a. Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford, 1986). Kropotkin, Peter (1842–1921). After Bakunin’s death in 1876, Kropotkin was the most influential theorist of *anarch- ism for several decades. Early in his life he rejected his aristocratic background and stubbornly maintained his confidence in the supreme goodness of human nature and attributed any evidence to the contrary to the insidious influence of state authority and exploitative capitalism. For Kropotkin, any external authority was corrupt by def- inition and thus he never attempted to describe the organ- izational principles of an anarchist movement or society, believing that it was up to the oppressed masses to arrange the system under which they lived. In his attempt to imbue the whole of society with ethical principles, Kropotkin did produce many practical plans for the improvement of agricultural and industrial communities. And his biting criticisms of the terrible power of the state to disrupt and destroy what he considered natural com- munities remain impressive. d.m cl. C. Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism 1872–1886 (Cambridge, 1989). M. Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago, 1976). Kuhn, Thomas (1922–96). In The Structure of Scientific Revo- lutions, the most influential book in modern *philosophy of science, Kuhn argues that scientists work within and against the background of an unquestioned theory or set of beliefs, something he characterizes as a ‘paradigm’. Sometimes, however, a paradigm seems to come unstuck, and it is necessary that a new one be provided. What makes Kuhn’s position stimulating and controversial is the central claim that there can be no strictly logical reason for the change of a paradigm. As in political revolutions, partisans argue in a circular fashion from within their own camps. Expectedly, this claim was anathema to old- fashioned rationalists like Karl Popper, for whom science is the apotheosis of sound and logical defensible thought. Paradoxically, however, Kuhn and Popper are both evolutionary epistemologists, seeing essential analogies between their (very different) views of scientific change and the evolution of organisms. m.r. *evolutionary epistemology; reductionism; revolu- tions, scientific. G. Gutting, Paradigms and Revolutions (Notre Dame, Ind., 1980). T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962). Ku¯ kai (774–835). Posthumous name, Ko¯bo¯ Daishi. Founder of the Shingon school of esoteric *Buddhism, Ku¯kai was Japan’s first philosophical thinker. He was an accomplished poet and expert calligrapher, an ascetic saint, nature mystic, and influential cultural leader, as well as a prolific writer on religion, philosophy, literature, 482 Kreisel, Georg philosophy at the end of the twentieth century thomas kuhn’s 1962 monograph on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions swiftly established itself as the most important work of the century in the philosophy of science. The influence of its new vision of how theories come and go was felt throughout the academic world. bernard williams, impatient with the restricted scope and imagination of academic philosophers, led them to broader conceptions of ethics and the self, and sought to bring philo- sophy into closer engagement with real life and with the histo- ry of Western intellectual culture. Meanwhile his work on government committees helped Britons to address some prob- lems of the self, specifically in connection with sex, drugs, and gambling. david k. lewis granted existence to a plethora of possible worlds in order to answer a wide range of philosophical ques- tions. His systematic worldview was as hard to refute as it was to believe in. richard rorty, who himself once worked in the mainstream of analytic philosophy, became its scourge, and the contempor- ary philosopher most admired in other disciplines, where his ironic turn seemed a fitting response to doubts about truth and progress. 484 Ku¯ kai history, art, architecture, linguistics, and education. Ku¯kai argued that every human being is in principle capable of ‘attaining enlightenment in this very existence’, on the grounds of a sophisticated synthesis of ideas from the four major schools of Maha¯ya¯na Buddhism that had been transmitted to Japan. He held that through practice of the ‘three mysteries’ of meditation, mantra (shingon, ‘true word’), and mudra (hand gesture), one can proceed through the ‘ten stages’ to the ultimate realization of one’s identity with Maha¯vairocana ( Japanese, Dainichi Nyorai), primary embodiment of the cosmic Buddha. g.r.p. Ku¯kai: Major Works, tr. with an account of his life and a study of his thought by Yoshito S. Hakeda (New York, 1972). Lacan, Jacques (1901–81). French psychoanalyst whose riddling style and heterodox (though, as he would have it, scrupulously faithful) reading of Freud have generated numerous controversies and splits within the analytic movement over the past thirty years. Lacan’s chief claim—drawing on the linguistics of Saussure and Jakob- son—is that the unconscious is literally ‘structured like a language’, so that Freud’s somewhat vague terminology of (e.g.) psychic ‘condensation’ and ‘displacement’ can be rendered more precise by translation into the equivalent rhetorical terms, ‘metaphor’ and ‘metonymy’. In which case reason is no longer master in its own house but sub- ject to all the lures and slippages of a language caught up in the toils of desire, or the endless ‘defiles of the signifier’. Thus for Descartes’s formula *Cogito, ergo sum Lacan sub- stitutes his own rendition: ‘cogito, ergo sum’ ubi cogito, ibi non sum, or ‘Where I think “I think, therefore I am”, that is where I am not’. c.n. J. Lacan, Écrits, tr. A. Sheridan (London, 1977). Lakatos, Imre (1922–74). Born in Hungary. His doctoral study in Cambridge produced Proofs and Refutations, a multilogue embodying a fallibilist epistemology for math- ematics in which mathematical proofs—and what they prove—are negotiated. After appointment at the London School of Economics, debates with Popper, Feyerabend, and Kuhn helped to forge his Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (MSRP). According to Lakatos, Popper’s naïve falsificationism fails on two counts: the logical Duhem problem, and the mismatch between falsi- ficationist prescription and the history of science. As the chief criterion of scientific success and the neutral judge among competing methodological principles, Lakatos substituted, in the place of truth or truth-likeness, a historically characterized notion of progress. n.c. t.chi. r.f.h. *fallibilism; methodology. I. Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations (Cambridge, 1976). —— Collected Papers, i and ii, ed. J. Worrall and G. Currie (Cambridge, 1978). Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, chevalier de (1744–1829). French biologist and evolutionary theorist, now principally remembered for his belief that the organs and habits of animals can be altered or newly produced in law- like ways by pressure from the environment, and that organs and habits thus acquired by individuals are then transmitted to their offspring by hereditary means. The contrary Darwinian belief, that characteristics acquired by environmental pressure cannot be genetically transmit- ted, is now generally accepted by biologists. Nevertheless, well before Darwin Lamarck had taken the step of seeing the evolution of species as being governed by lawlike processes, even if—again unlike Darwin—he saw the law of *evolution as having a natural drive towards perfec- tion. Nevertheless, human *culture, opposed to biological development, can be seen in broadly Lamarckian terms, as involving the transmission through tradition and edu- cation of what has been learned in the experience of earlier generations. a.o’h. *determinism; perfectionism. H. G. Cannon, Lamarck and Modern Genetics (New York, 1960). La Mettrie, Julien Offray de (1709–51). French physician and materialist philosopher, reviled in his own time for his professed *atheism, *determinism, and *hedonism, but an important figure in the history of *materialism. He fol- lowed the mechanical approach to medicine of his teacher Boerhaave, and developed a purely naturalistic, empiricist approach to living organisms, including human beings. He regarded his position as an extension of the worth- while mechanistic aspect of Descartes’s philosophy, while abandoning Cartesian *dualism and *rationalism. He first suggested the physiological character of mental processes in Histoire naturelle de l’âme (1745) and developed the doc- trine in an even more resolutely mechanistic-materialist framework in his most famous work, L’Homme machine (Machine Man (1747)). However, he saw matter as essen- tially active and sensitive, rather than inert. Once neglected, La Mettrie can now be seen as a pioneer of scientific psychology. a.bel. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Machine Man and Other Writings (Cambridge, 1996). Kathleen Wellman, La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlighten- ment (Durham, NC, 1992). L language. What do we share when we share a language? Just as we count species by asking whether two candidates for the same species can interbreed, so we count lan- guages by asking whether bringing speakers of them together breeds communication. By such a measure the world contains at least 4,500 natural languages, or lan- guages naturally learned and spoken. Africa contains between 700 and 3,000; New Guinea languages alone number around 1,100, divided into some sixty families (it is the task of anthropological linguistics to bring a theor- etical taxonomy into the superficial chaos). The imprecision of counting reflects phonetic, grammatical, and semantic lapses from perfect identity. It is not surprising that our ability to speak together breaks down when we think of exotic and alien ways of liv- ing, perhaps involving different categories and different understanding of what is salient and what is unimportant. But if your experience and your reactions to the world, and your system of beliefs, is different from mine, as it will be, to what extent does superficial sameness of language mask difference of meaning? Exposure to a different gen- eration or gender can be enough to make me ask if you can read my words as I intend them. But is not the way I intend them itself a function of something I already share with you, namely an identical linguistic inheritance? It is not as though my intentions are fixed points for me, independ- ently of the linguistic expression I find it natural to give them. We ought not to think of sharing a language as a kind of accidental coincidence of idiolects (privately owned and defined languages). But how many factors must we take into account before declaring that we know what someone else means—and, for that matter, is it any easier to know what we ourselves mean, or meant a little while ago? Recoiling from linguistic solipsism we may hope for uniformities: a God’s-eye point of view from which all lan- guages are means to one end. It would be nice if one’s home tongue—twenty-first-century English, say—con- tained the resources to say everything that can be said in any language; indeed, some philosophers have argued that if we cannot interpret or translate a candidate back into our own tongue, then we can dismiss its claims to be a language at all. This is best diagnosed as a quaint misuse of the *verification principle (for there is after all the rather less colonial alternative of going out and learning the new language, rather than learning to translate it back into one’s home terms). The conceptual difficulties in thinking about language become vivid when we consider marginal and unusual candidates. Are the signalling systems of animals properly regarded as languages? If a chimpanzee can associate sounds with things, and put sounds together in simple ways, is this acquiring the essence of linguistic behaviour? Is a computer language a kind of language? Does it make sense to posit a *‘language of thought’ or background lan- guage, like the machine code of a computer, whereby human beings process their first natural language? And is there a language of music, or art, or clothes? These questions are not so much troublesome in themselves, since we might just posit a criterion that marginal cases do or do not meet. The problem is that we cannot discern a principle. We are not sure what status any definition or criterion of linguistic behaviour could deserve. And quite apart from difficult cases other problems make them- selves felt. Is it an essential aspect of language that it is used to communicate? If so, how do we explain soliloquy and solitary verbal play, and can we rule out a priori the possi- bility of a Robinson Crusoe from birth, who yet manages to symbolize things to himself? But if not, what other explanation can there be for such a specialized adaptation as linguistic competence? s.w.b. *discourse; meaning. G. Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago, 1987). W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960). language, artificial: see artificial language. language, formal: see formal language. language, history of the philosophy of. The history of philosophical thinking about *language is not easily separ- ated from the history of logic, nor indeed from the entire history of philosophy. There is no division between thought about the major philosophical categories— knowledge, truth, meaning, reason—and thought about the language used to express those categories. Further- more, many problems can be phrased either metaphysi- cally (Are species real or conventional? Is the number five an object?) or as problems in the philosophy of language (Are words for species controlled by distinctions in nature or by conventions? Does the numeral ‘five’ function like a name?). There is therefore no major philosopher or school that has not had some doctrine about the relationship between mind and language, and language and the world. In surveying such a history it is possible to concentrate upon the detailed grain and textures separating the prob- lems of one period from those of another, but only at the cost of staying blind to the permanence of the great prob- lems, and the ways in which modern doctrines and approaches are anticipated indefinitely earlier. In this brief survey I concentrate on the continuities rather than the differences. It is possible that Parmenides attached to his meta- physical *monism the doctrine that nothing false can be said or thought, on the grounds that sentences serve as names of states of affairs; names with no bearers are meaningless; but a false sentence fails to name anything; hence no false sentence has meaning. If the argument raises more aston- ishment than conviction, it also suggests the problems that prove permanently difficult: What is the relationship between a sentence and the state of affairs that it reports or that would make it true? How is a sentence for which there is no such state of affairs different from a name without a bearer? Are these always meaningless? The *Sophists, who began the process of grammatical 486 language categorization, were centrally concerned with ‘the cor- rectness of words’, or the relationship that words need to bear to things to become instruments of knowledge. They were also concerned with understanding: thus Gorgias is presented as having raised the sceptical trouble that when I give you a word that is all that I do: there is no transfer of one and the same idea from my mind to yours and, even if there were, there is a gap between my idea and the fea- tures and qualities of things it may seem to represent. Ver- sions of this problem reappear in the twentieth century in concerns of the later work of Wittgenstein, in the prob- lems with translation emphasized by W. V. Quine, and in the general scepticism about determinate *meaning char- acteristic of *post-modernism. Plato’s dialogue Cratylus (c.390 bc) is the first general discussion of the role of convention in language. Socrates sees clearly that even if it is arbitrary or conventional whether we use one word or another for horses (one soci- ety may call them ‘hippos’ and another ‘equus’ with equal propriety) there is something else that it would be possible to be right or wrong about. It is not arbitrary or conven- tional that this particular animal is a horse, or that it is cor- rect to call it a horse, nor is it conventional that there exists a similarity or form that horses share but cows, for example, do not. The distinction here may be between a word, whose association with anything is a matter of human usage and convention, and a concept or kind, whose appli- cation to things is not conventional but a matter of truth or falsity. Plato embodies this in the concept of an ‘ideal name’, which in more modern terms may be thought of as a correctly framed concept, conforming to the nature of things in the way that classifying substances as liquid or solid does, whereas classifying a substance as phlogiston, or classifying a complex phenomenon as brotherly love or freedom may not. Plato is dealing here with the fact that only an ‘adequate’ or correctly formed and stocked lan- guage can be a vehicle for framing and communicating knowledge. The demand is for a correspondence whereby thought reflects the nature of its objects. The ideal this represents surfaces throughout the subsequent history of philosophy, for example in the goal of finding an ideal lan- guage, found in Leibniz, Russell, and *Logical Positivism. In Indian philosophy the Mı¯ma¯m . sa¯ school celebrates the sacred correctness of Sanskrit, as opposed to the Buddhist emphasis on the conventional and possibly misleading role of language in knowledge. Especially in the Sophist Plato also gave extended discussions of the possibility of intelligible talk about the non-existent, and showed some recognition of the difference between stating something and naming something, the crucial distinction overlooked (or perhaps mishandled) in the Parmenidean argument against falsity. Among the many problems bequeathed by Plato was that of *universals (forms), or unchanging abstractions which make up the proper objects of human knowledge: partly the forms are an answer to the problem that, according to Aristotle, reduced the Sophist Cratylus to wagging his finger, which was that capturing the ever-changing flux in words seemed like attempting to map a cloud. Aristotle saw (as, in some passages, Plato did) that the Forms are at best a stopgap, for it must be a mis- take to try to explain what different things have in com- mon by postulating a further thing to which they bear some relation. His naturalistic response to Plato’s other world of unchanging Forms was to locate the universal in things, or in other words to identify it with the shared common properties lying in particulars. However, the suggestion opens the road to a more thoroughgoing nom- inalism, according to which everything that exists is par- ticular: the problem is to reconcile this sensible, hard-headed view with the need for general terms if thought is to take place at all. Aristotle’s vast contribution to logic and grammar should not conceal another funda- mental idea that he brought to the philosophy of lan- guage. This is that words work by being symptoms or signs of mental states of the user (he also thought that written words are similarly only symbols of spoken words: the earliest example of the ‘phonocentric’ tradition railed against in *deconstructionism). Aristotle distin- guished names from predicates, and he saw that only a complex sentence was capable of truth and falsity. How- ever, his account of the way in which a sequence of terms comes to be true or false remains unclear, partly because the basis of the difference between names and predicates remains insecure. In the syllogistic logic that descends from Aristotle through medieval philosophy the terms are common nouns (man, horse) that are thought of as referring to men or horses, but the idea breaks down when we ask which men or horses are referred to in phrases such as ‘some men’, or ‘no horses’, or in sentences such as ‘Henry is not a horse’. It was left to the *Stoics to distinguish clearly the neces- sary concept of a lekton or proposition, as well as that of the sentence (the Stoics also recognized different kinds of lekta, corresponding to questions, commands, promises, and so on, so they may be said to have anticipated the the- ory of *illocutionary force). However, propositions or lekta enjoy an uneasy relationship with other things. They are distinguished from the sequences of words, or sen- tences, that express them, but also from the sensations or images that loom up in conscious life, and from the states of affairs whose existence makes them true and whose non-existence makes them false. Their shadowy nature made them easy targets for both *Epicureans and ancient *Sceptics. Sextus Empiricus, for example, uses the standard modern anti-Platonist argument that abstract entities are not capable of having causal consequences; in which case they can neither ‘indicate nor make evident’ things, for to do this entails having effects on the person apprehending them; hence they are theoretically useless and should play no part in a naturalistic science of the mind. The argument applies to both Platonic and Aris- totelian universals. There are only words and things, or even perhaps only words and sensations. The main prob- lem such sensationalism faces is that in such a world noth- ing seems to represent anything else: meaning is language, history of the philosophy of 487 demystified only by being removed altogether. Although both Epicureans and Stoics made moves to fend off the catastrophe, the dilemma that the philosophy of language either makes use of mysterious, abstract, universal objects of thought or descends to the natural and the empirical but loses meaning altogether continues to dominate con- temporary approaches to language. Platonism about universals has an other-worldly flavour congenial to Christian thinkers such as St Augus- tine, but medieval thought tended either to Aristotelian- ism (centrally in St Thomas Aquinas) or to the nominalism of fourteenth-century thinkers influenced by William of Ockham. In particular Aquinas’s moderate suggestion that a thing might be singular or universal according to dif- ferent ways of taking it is mercilessly attacked by Ockham: anything whatsoever is one, single thing. But the medieval emphasis on the links between grammar and logic on the one hand and logic and reason on the other make nominalism particularly hard to stomach: utter- ances considered as physical particulars are not the subject of reason or logic. However, the medieval period saw the first major work in logic since Aristotle, with close atten- tion paid to such problems as those of intensionality and the semantic paradoxes. The seventeenth-century turn away from scholastic logic saw a surprising unanimity, stretching from Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and above all John Locke in Britain to Arnauld and the Port Royal Logic in France, that Aristotle was right in supposing that words were the *signs of ideas, and ideas the signs of things. Equally char- acteristic of the period was the belief that while language was a dangerous medium, apt to distort and obscure ideas as much as to transmit them, it could be refined or reinvented in a form free from these dangers. Partly this was the result of recognizing that the developing sciences needed to find languages and notations adequate to their different tasks. This concern is later echoed in the nine- teenth-century recognition of the intimate connection between an apparently notational advance (e.g. finding arabic numerals or Leibniz’s notation for the calculus) and a major conceptual advance (learning the importance of the number zero, being able to differentiate). Book iii of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is the most thoroughgoing late seventeenth-century attack on the problem. Words become substitutes for ideas, and in order to avoid the danger of being taken in by empty sounds without meaning, we must form the habit of sub- stituting ideas, the real substance of thought, for words whenever possible. Locke’s immense influence halted serious philosophy of language, arguably until Kant, although a small rearguard action was fought by Berkeley. For while Berkeley often subscribes to the conventional view that words without ideas give us only ‘the husk of sci- ence rather than the thing’ he does acknowledge ‘that there may be another use of words, besides that of mark- ing and suggesting distinct ideas, to wit, the influencing our conduct and actions; which may be done either by forming rules for us to act by, or by raising certain passions, dispositions, and emotions in our minds’ (Alciphron, bk. vii). Berkeley had here the ingredients for the later ‘use’-based or pragmatist account of meaning, but can scarcely be said to have freed himself from the Lock- ean or Aristotelian model. A similar struggle to retain the meaning of words whilst realizing that there are no ideas associated with them can be seen in Hume’s explorations of causation, identity, and the self. Berkeley’s other quar- rel with Locke is his rejection of any abstraction in favour of particular ideas standing for other particular things. Here he is later echoed by Bentham, who considered all abstractions as fictions, with meaningful talk confined to reference to concrete situations (too concrete, however, and we end up back with Cratylus, reduced to silence). It was left to Kant to make the substantial break with the empiricist equation between understanding and the passive possession of mental phantasms. Kant not only repudiated the Lockean theory of ideas, but reintroduced the needed concentration on the nature of judgement, with its own forms and categories, presuppositions, and claims to objectivity. He also provided the terms within which much later philosophy of language became framed: *analytic versus synthetic, *a priori versus a posteriori, *rules versus descriptions. But above all it is Kant’s sover- eign concern with the question how judgement of such- and-such a sort is possible that marks a reconnection to pre-seventeenth-century priorities, and a heralding of later ones. Nevertheless, the Kantian judgement might still serve as Aristotle’s intermediary, represented by words and itself representing things. Indeed, the other elements in Kant that led to the triumph of German *idealism also pro- vided an historical matrix within which Kantian judge- ments functioned, rather like the Empiricists’ ideas, as fairly self-standing elements of consciousness compared with which everything else was problematic. Nineteenth- century idealism severs any connection between language and the world, at least if the world is conceived of as dis- tinct from thought. Language and thought became entirely self-contained in a kind of solipsistic unity (as they arguably do in the deconstructionist view that nothing lies outside the text, since any attempt to correlate a text with anything else merely produces more text). On such views the main apparent casualty is truth, which stops being a correspondence between language and the world, but becomes either the unity and completeness of the whole structure of judgements (the *coherence theory of truth), or the use words have in directing effective action (the *pragmatic theory of truth). It was Frege who reconnected language with truth without an intermediary psychology. Frege’s revolution in logic is not the issue here (*logic; *quantifier; *variable) but the associated belief that nothing ‘psychologistic’ gives us anything essential to meaning, which resides rather in the way a term or more fundamentally a sen- tence is employed in the world: the way it presents things as being. The connection that electrifies sentences is not one between them and ideas or even judgements, but one 488 language, history of the philosophy of between them and their ‘truth-conditions’. The task of a systematic theory of meaning of a language (a semantic theory) is that of categorizing the expressions it contains, and describing in a systematic fashion the way in which the truth-conditions of sentences are built from the contri- butions of their components. Frege’s description of this goal, and his brilliant application of the ideas to the lan- guage of mathematics, was the dominating impulse behind modern analytical philosophy, and the concern with the syntax and semantics of the languages of science that characterized Logical Positivism. However, on the topic of the human user of the language Frege is less forth- coming. He puts in place the idea of sentences as having objective senses, expressing thoughts that are grasped by those using them. But the story is entirely schematic, rem- iniscent of the Stoic doctrine of lekta, and Frege tells us nothing of the nature of this grasp, nor how to answer the old objections to the use of such abstract entities in the theory of language. It is usually said that twentieth-century philosophy of language began with the eclipse of Hegelian idealism, and the triumph of *realism. This is a half-truth that ignores the large place that both idealism and *pragmatism played throughout the period. Pragmatism in particular promises to circumvent the old opposition between the idealist stasis of ideas-staying-in-the-head and the unargued realist correspondence between elements of language and elements of the world. The ingredient it adds is that of words answering a purpose, or playing a role in a practice or technique (ideas present in Berkeley, as was seen above, and reintroduced in the later work of Wittgenstein). James saw the correspondence between true judgement and reality not in terms of an abstract cor- respondence but as a dynamic control: true judgements are those that work, truths are what we must take account of if we are to survive. One might see some of James’s con- cern with practice as foreshadowed too by Nietzsche’s understanding of the political dimension of language use: by naming and categorizing we do not do something prac- tically neutral, but privilege social attitudes and struc- tures. Dictating thought is also dictating action. In turn there is a connection back to Kant’s emphasis on the pri- macy of practical judgement, and the political turn that this idea is given in Hegel and Marx. In the twentieth century the political and other prac- tical dimensions of meaning were frequently regarded as a slightly disreputable secondary element, outside the pure theory of representation. For, going entirely the other way, Russell and Wittgenstein looked for an abstract cor- respondence between language and the world, and developed the application of Frege’s logic to problems of language in terms of a structural resemblance between a sentence and that of which it is a picture (the *truth- condition). Their work culminated in Wittgenstein’s Trac- tatus Logico-Philosophicus, in which the curiously disembod- ied atomic constituents of language stand in relations that mirror the structure of the facts that make up the world. Wittgenstein’s rejection of any association between psychology and the philosophy of language went beyond anything to which the more traditional Russell could sub- scribe. Russell’s own version of *logical atomism located the atoms to which basic terms corresponded in an uneasy space between the objective world and the subjective rep- resentation of it. Atomism was, however, always a fragile flower, and amongst the hostile winds blowing over it was the work on language done by Ferdinand de Saussure, showing that the phonemes out of which spoken language is made could not be considered as individual, physically definable pulses, but exist only in a system of ‘differences’; the same point applied to semantics quickly suggests that no sentence maintains its own private relationship with reality, but that the system as a whole must take priority (as, indeed, the idealists had always maintained). Never- theless, and in spite of the short-lived adherence of its author, the Tractatus in turn gave birth to the fundamental positivist belief that the logic or syntax of language dic- tates the solution to all other epistemological or meta- physical concerns with it. Either a philosophical problem was solved by essentially Fregean semantics, or it was shown to be a pseudo-problem. Problems in the philoso- phy of language thus collapse into internal problems about the syntax and semantics of language, thought of as a pre-existent structure. But the foundations of this opti- mism crumbled on three ancient rocks. Firstly, it went along with no coherent story connecting language with experience. Secondly, it had no description of the status of logic and reason itself: the Fregean advance within logic had not produced a parallel advance in the question of the status of logic. And thirdly, it could produce no theory of the proper domain of the use of reason and experience together, certifying even the simplest movements of sci- entific thought. The need to reintroduce the excluded issues of experience, understanding, and the place of lan- guage use in the context of a set of practical questions was constantly urged against the Frege–Russell tradition by writers such as R. G. Collingwood. Although the possibil- ity of external theory of this kind has been doubted, the authority given to the criticism by the later Wittgenstein means that contemporary works in the philosophy of lan- guage may bear as much resemblance to the idealist H. H. Joachim’s The Nature of Truth (1906) or to the pragmatist William James’s The Meaning of Truth (1909) as they do to the founding works of analytical philosophy. s.w.b. There is no single specialist work on the history of the philosophy of language. But as well as general histories of philosophy, readers may wish to consult: A. J. P. Kenny, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford, 2000), ch. 3. W. and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford, 1960). W. Künne, Conceptions of Truth (Oxford, 2003). B. Mates, Stoic Logic (Berkeley, Calif., 1953). language, knowledge of. Competent use of a language depends on knowing a language, and the nature of this knowledge has been the subject of dispute amongst philosophers. Some conceive knowledge of language as a practical skill, a matter of know-how, like riding a bicycle language, knowledge of 489 . is language, history of the philosophy of 487 demystified only by being removed altogether. Although both Epicureans and Stoics made moves to fend off the catastrophe, the dilemma that the philosophy. to the idealist H. H. Joachim’s The Nature of Truth (1906) or to the pragmatist William James’s The Meaning of Truth (1909) as they do to the founding works of analytical philosophy. s.w.b. There. using them. But the story is entirely schematic, rem- iniscent of the Stoic doctrine of lekta, and Frege tells us nothing of the nature of this grasp, nor how to answer the old objections to the