Language and Learning: Philosophy of Language in the Hellenistic Age (review)

Reviewed by: Language and Learning: Philosophy of Language in the Hellenistic Age Phillip Mitsis (bio) Dorothea Frede and Brad Inwood, editors. Language and Learning: Philosophy of Language in the Hellenistic Age Cambridge University Press. xi, 354. $105.95 Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy never underwent the so-called linguistic turn that so profoundly affects contemporary philosophical methods and arguments. This does not mean, of course, that philosophers in antiquity failed to reflect on the origin and structure of language or its role in thought and relation to objects. But they never came to view something called 'the philosophy of language' as a significant discipline in its own right. Nor did they believe that an inquiry into language could serve as the crucial point of entry into philosophical problems. As a consequence, their views about language are rarely elaborated with anything like the sophistication and power of, say, their views in ethics or epistemology. Dorothea Frede and Brad Inwood offer a crisp and stimulating introduction to the volume, outlining the origins and subsequent development [End Page 369] of ancient philosophical reflections on language, and they offer some plausible suggestions about why so little came so late. They also claim that philosophers of the Hellenistic age should be credited with forging important new philosophical links between technical linguistico-grammatical studies and wider philosophical analyses of human communication. One problem, of course, is that any traces of what has come to be the reigning philosophical synthesis are extremely faint in the Hellenistic period because of the sorry state of the evidence. If one looks hard enough, one can perhaps see adumbrations of such crucial items as Fregean propositions, conceptions of ordinary and meta-languages, and sciences of grammar and linguistics. But the general picture is so consistently blurry that it is probably better just to take individual arguments and doctrines on their own without expecting much clarity about what these important new links actually amount to. The ten essays on offer are what one might expect from those faced with the task of being learned guides in the museum of philosophy. The first four essays focus on Epicurean and Stoic puzzles about the origins of language. Major protagonists are introduced and scanty fragments examined in a counterpoint of paired papers. There is precious little here for the non-specialist, however. Indeed, the evidence is brought out in tones so hushed and reticent, and every claim is so variously qualified, that Tony Long, that most judicious of scholars, is made to seem like a stevedore at a ladies' tea by making the entirely reasonable assumption that the Stoics were influenced by Plato's Cratylus and the proto-formalist account of semantic items found there. Ineke Sluiter, with the help of modern theories of non-verbal communication and 'impression management,' examines the Cynics in 'Communicating Cynicism: Diogenes' gangsta rap.' She plausibly claims that the Cynics made conscious use of their body for philosophical purposes, but then argues that these purposes can best be understood within the transgressive literary traditions of invective and comedy. This is unlikely. When the Cynics masturbate in public, they do so not as creatures of low comedy unable to control their desires; they masturbate in the name of nature, reason, and God. Nor is Diogenes interested in pimping his barrel. Rather than being the theatrical prop of a comedian, the barrel Diogenes lived in aids, as does his rolling around in snow and hot sand, his ascetic askesis. Accordingly, a better anthropological parallel would be provided, perhaps, by Indian holy men living in barrels as part of a heat purification ritual. Viewing the Cynics as gangstas, moreover, fails to explain how they could have been such an important influence on the high-minded and theologically driven Stoics. Charles Brittain offers a spotty but important possible reconstruction of the theoretical underpinnings of what arguably passes for a conception of ordinary thought and language in Cicero. After a superbly informative [End Page 370] paper on ancient analogist and anomalist linguistic theories by David Blank, there follow two specialist papers on Stoic logic and a final paper by Sten Ebbensen detailing Hellenistic influence in the medieval period. As he himself notices, it is impossible...

Reviewed by: Proclus' Commentary on the Cratylus in Context: Ancient Theories of Language and Naming Taneli Kukkonen R. M. van den Berg . Proclus' Commentary on the Cratylus in Context: Ancient Theories of Language and Naming. Philosophia Antiqua, 112. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2008. Pp. xvii + 239. Cloth, $127.00. This excellent new monograph does everything it promises: it sets the excerpts we have of Proclus's teaching on the Cratylus in their proper historical setting, carefully laying out what Proclus thought Plato's dialogue accomplishes in light of the questions the intervening philosophical tradition had posed. This alone would justify the use in the title of the otherwise tired "in Context" trope; but van den Berg does much more. In recounting the steps that bring us from Plato's Cratylus to Proclus's Cratylus, van den Berg provides a comprehensive history of ancient accounts of names and naming. The work thereby richly earns its subtitle as well. The first of van den Berg's book's many virtues is the attention it gives to Plato's Cratylus itself. In chapter one, van den Berg persuasively argues that Plato is engaged in a different sort of project than his many successors: Plato's concern is with how names can be incorrectly assigned, and his answer hinges on the contention that such assignments reflect the divisions in being that they presuppose. Everyday language, crafted on the model of the sensible world, is thus an altogether unreliable guide to ultimate reality. This stands in stark contrast to Aristotle, who habitually starts from ordinary language-use in his investigations and whose famous program of "saving the phenomena" (which van den Berg curiously does not reference) reveals a fundamental trust in the ability of the pre-philosophical mind to fix upon relevant aspects of reality. Chapters two and three review the developments in Hellenistic philosophy and within Plotinus's school in order to highlight how remarkable was Proclus's return to the Platonic standpoint. Crucial here is Porphyry's adoption of the conventionalist Aristotelian story concerning the signification of language, making it all the more difficult for scholars to discern how different Plato's view was. Indicative of the restraint exercised by van den Berg is the fact that the terms 'semantics' and 'philosophy of language' do not appear here, or indeed anywhere in the volume, in any explanatory capacity. Instead, van den Berg focuses squarely on the phenomenon of name-giving. This is entirely appropriate, given the background of the Cratylus, though it does mean that, e.g., the Epicureans' intriguing theory concerning the natural genesis of all expressions (not just nouns) gets rather short shrift. After setting the stage, van den Berg outlines Proclus's contribution to the ancient discussions in three chapters. In chapter four, Proclus's theory on correct naming is revealed, with interesting asides made to contemporary theories concerning language-use and imposition; chapter five traces parallels between the activities of name-crafting and language-learning and the cosmic Neoplatonic movements of process and return; and in chapter six, the question of the divine names is broached, a topic on which Proclus unsurprisingly had much to say, despite the neglect that this aspect of the Cratylus (again, unsurprisingly) has endured in the modern age. All the while, van den Berg aptly shows how Proclus's Parmenides commentary and Platonic Theology, e.g., can shed light on the comments, sometimes scant, on the Cratylus preserved in his student's hand. [End Page 309] Van den Berg's various remarks concerning the ancient tradition as a whole are judicious and informative, while his more detailed study of Proclus is truly groundbreaking in several respects. Following van den Berg's work, no one can any longer ignore the facts that, in the final phase of ancient philosophy, Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of name-giving were genuinely in contention and that the general acceptance of Aristotle's On Interpretation had to be balanced by deference to Proclus's emphatic Platonism. This conclusion, briefly sketched in chapter seven of the present work, will hopefully be expanded in future studies. Another significant gain has to do with van den Berg's situation of the Cratylus commentary within...

The question of the origin and genesis of human language was a central issue in the debate on the philosophy of language in the eighteenth century - a debate in which Johann Gottfried Herder (17 44-1803) was an important participant. Herder proposed that the phenomenon of language was a product of a complex process which encompassed the whole of human nature - sensory, intellectual, corporeal, and social. The aim of this dissertation is to bring together the anthropological aspects in Herder's philosophy of language; to compare them with earlier theories on the origin of language, such as those of Etienne Bonnet de Condillac, JeanJacques Rousseau and Johann Peter SOBmilch; and to show that Herder's views were strongly influenced by contemporary thought on the nature of man. The discussion focuses on two of Herder's works, his Abhandlung ilber den Ursprung der Sprache (written in 1770, and published in 1772), and the first and second parts of his ldeen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-1785). Together they make up the core of Herder's ideas on the genesis of language. We begin with a description of Herder's concept of an interconnection and interaction between soul and sense organs (the auditory, in particular) without which language cannot be formulated. Herder's assessment of sensory perception and the accentuation of the sense of hearing is presented against a background of contemporary interest in sound, hearing, and the processes involved in the production of speech. Herder came to regard man's upright posture, with its accompanying enlargement of the brain, as the main force which increased the potential in man's mental powers and paved the way for human language. In the present analysis, his views are presented within the framework of the natural histories written by Georges-Louis-Marie Comte de Button, Charles Bonnet and others, as well as against the background of another interest of his time, the then new study of comparative anatomy. Herder believed that, despite the advantages nature has bestowed on man in his mental and physical make-up, man's natural predisposition to language is realised not through instinct, but only through many years of learning and interaction in a social framework. These views are presented in the context of the writings of Hermann Samuel Reimarus, which were, at the time, at the forefront of the discussion on instinct. We also investigate Herder's ideas on the role played by the mother tongue, through which a child learns to speak and to think. Language, reason, and social life enables man to evolve intellectually and culturally to his end: humanity.

In this paper, the author presents a critical edition of three chapters on rhetorical de-vices excerpted from the treatise O wymowie i stylu (On Eloquence and Style, Warsaw 1815) written by Stanisław Kostka Potocki (1755-1821), an enlightened man of letters. He begins with a brief introduction to a reading of Potocki’s text on some figurative uses of language. The author explains the circumstances in which Potocki wrote his rhetorical manual (the request of the Warsaw Society of Friends of Learning) and discusses its most important sources, both classic (Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, Cicero’s On the Ideal Orator, Quintilian’s Institutions of Oratory) and modern (César Chesneau Dumarsais’ Traité des Tropes, Paris 1730, Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Dublin, Edinburgh 1783). With a few explanatory remarks on the three chapters presenting the nature of figurative language (in particular metaphor, personification, hyperbole and apostrophe) the author examines the connection between the rhetorical considerations on style and the Enlightenment philosophy of language. According to Stanisław Kostka Potocki, the tropes and rhetorical figures, being almost natural expressions of emotions, passions and imagination, should be regarded as the primordial origin of the human language. Thus the Enlightenment, the triumph of analytical (‘pure’) reason over imagination tinged with emotionality, is a period when authors intentionally limited the use of figurative language (although never totally rejected it) in order to reach the simplicity of the linguistic expression.

The problem of the meaning in the Epicurean philosophy of language is still today a highly controversial topic. The aim of this paper is to examine the contribution of Ep. ad Her . 37-8 to properly semantic issues. In this perspective, some key-essays on Epicurus’ philosophy of language and epistemology will be reviewed focusing on the problematic relationship between reality, prolepsis and language. It will be argued that – pace scholars such as Glidden and Giannantoni – the Greek philosopher may be credited with a genuine interest in the semantic dimension of human language. It will be further argued that it is the concept of prolepsis to intermediate between semantics and epistemology. In the final sections attention is paid to both Ep. ad Her . 75-6 and Lucretius De rer. Nat. V, 1028-90. Epicurus’ and Lucretius’ ideas on the origin of language are briefly commented upon and their influence on much later thinkers such as Leibniz and Vico is documented.

Predmet ovoga rada je rasvjetljivanje biti Fihteove filozofije jezika. U prvom planu je analiza Fihteovog spisa „O jezičkoj sposobnosti i izvoru jezika“. U literaturi je poznatiji kao Journal-Aufsatz iz 1795. godine. Obim teksta uslovio je da se samo u nagovještajima, kao predmet kritičko-interpretacijske pažnje, imaju u vidu spis „O izvoru jezika“ (na temelju Platner-Vorlesung iz 1797) te četvrti i peti govor iz Fihteovih „Govora njemačkoj naciji“ iz 1808. godine. Fihteovo filozofsko-jezičko stanovište analizira se po modelu eksplikacije njegove noseće misaone strukture i kapitalnih odredbi jezika i njegovog ontološkog porijekla. Takođe, autor kritički stavlja Fihteovo shvatanje jezika u kontekst vodećih filozofsko-jezičkih i lingvističkih poimanja jezika.

Academics and standards. Ageing and language. Alphabet - religious beliefs. Alternate sign languages. Aphasia. Australian languages. Automatic speech recognition - stochastic techniques. Black English in education. Blasphemy. Burushaski. Caddoan languages. Cargo cults. Case grammar. Chart parsing and WFSSTs. Chomsky's philosophy of grammar. Classroom language - observation and research. Cognitive grammar. Cohesion and coherence in literature. Communicative intention. Computers and language use. Conservation analysis. Counterfactuals. Deaf community and culture. Deconstruction. Dependency phonology. Dictionaries, rhyming. Diderot, Denis. Dravidian languages. Dysarthrias, developmental. Ethnicity and language. Ethnopoetics. Factivity. Fluency - disorders. Formal semantics. Formalization and functionalism in linguistic criticism. Formulaic speech. Generative grammar. Gestures. Grammar - typological and areal issues. Historiography of linguistics. Immigrant languages in education - Sweden. Indirect speech acts. Information theory. Interjections. Intonation - pragmatics. Irish bardic grammarians. Italic languages. Japanese writing system. Journalism. Language as a platonic reality. Language death. Language promotion by governments. Language - Hindu views. Lexical semantics. Lexicography, post-classical Greek. Linguistic philosophy. Logical positivism. Mesoamerican writing. Metaphor in language. Mood and modality. Morphological universals. Multilingual states - political implications of language policies. Namibia - language situation. Naming of children. Natural language generation. New Englishes. Occitan. Ogden, Charles Kay. Origins of language - recent theories. Oxford English dictionary. Palaeontology, linguistic. Pathology of language - evaluation. Performative hypothesis. Philosophy of linguistics. Phonology - redundancy rules. Picture theory of meaning. Planudes, maximus. Pragmatic presuppositions. Preaching. Procedural semantics. Pronoun systems. Propositional calculus. Proxemics. Pseudolinguistics. Puns. Rajasthani. Reading processes in adults. Shorthand. Sign bilingualism - applications to education. Slang - sociology. Social networks and language. South America - sign languages. Speaker-characterization in speech technology. Speech aerodynamics. Structuralism and semiotics, literary. Subcategorization. Syntax and semantics - relationship. Technical vocabulary - medieval and renaissance English. Telegraph and telephone. Tense. Text pragmatics. Text-to-speech conversion systems. Thought and language. Translation, machine-aided. Translinguistics. Ugaritic. Universals of language. Urban dialectology. Valency changing alternations. Voice quality. Whistles and whistled speech. Word-formation processes. (Part contents).

The work of Ludwig Wittgenstein is seldom used by philosophers of technology, let alone in a systematic way, and in general there has been little discussion about the role of language in relation to technology. Conversely, Wittgenstein scholars have paid little attention to technology in the work of Wittgenstein. In this paper we read the Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty in order to explore the relation between language use and technology use, and take some significant steps towards constructing a framework for a Wittgensteinian philosophy of technology. This framework takes on board, and is in line with, insights from postphenomenological and hermeneutic approaches, but moves beyond those approaches by benefiting from Wittgenstein’s insights into the use of tools, technique, and performance, and by offering a transcendental interpretation of games, forms of life, and grammar. Focusing on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language in the Investigations, we first discuss the relation between language use and technology use, understood as tool use, by drawing on his analogy between language and tools. This suggests a more general theory of technology use, understood as performance. Then we turn to his epistemology and argue that Wittgenstein’s understanding of language use can be embedded within a more general theory about technology use understood as tool use and technique, since language-in-use is always already a skilled and embodied technological practice. Finally, we propose a transcendental interpretation of games, forms of life, and grammar, which also gives us a transcendental way of looking at technique, technological practice, and performance. With this analysis and interpretation, further supported by comments on robotics and music, we contribute to using and integrating Wittgenstein in a more systematic way within philosophy of technology and engage with perennial questions from the philosophical tradition.

SummaryRound the turn of the seventeenth century there was a revival of interest in and sympathy for scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy in the English universities. To some extent this meant a continuation of traditions that had never died out, but it also meant a conscious rejection of anti-Aristotelian doctrines like those of Ramus. Fortunately, we have good contemporary evidence of the sorts of authors recommended for study in the early 17th century in theDirections for a Student in the Universitie, attributed to Richard Holdsworth (1590–1649). Here we find a remarkable proportion of time given to the study of logic texts. An examination of the texts recommended, however, shows that they attempted little formal logic and were careless in what they did attempt. The primary interest of the authors of these books was in the philosophy of logic and language and in related epistemological and metaphysical questions. In this they show, if not the influence of Ramus, at least a parallel emphasis to that of some of the philosophies they rejected. Their philosophy of language is generally thoughtfully and coherently worked out, but it is not original. Indeed, it closely follows the doctrines of the medieval logicians and speculative grammarians, which philosophical doctrines can be identified with the principles delineated by Chomsky as characteristic of so-called Cartesian linguistics. The preservation of medieval philosophy of language combined with a relative lack of interest in medieval formal logic, however, has the effect of sharpening the emphasis in these works on what is innate in human beings and their use of language. This shift of interest rather than any real doctrinal change tends to distinguish these works from those of their medieval predecessors. In Edward Brerewood’s (c. 1565–1613) treatise on the diversity of languages (1614) we see these same philosophical doctrines combined with an interest that was new and not medieval, an interest in the historical and, in its way, empirical study of national languages themselves.

This study aims to analyze the contribution of philosophy of language in linguistic studies, particularly related to the concept of meaning and language use. The main problem studied is how philosophy of language provides a conceptual foundation for understanding the meaning of language that is not only structural, but also contextual and pragmatic. This study uses a qualitative method with a library research approach through conceptual analysis of the works of philosophers of language and contemporary linguistic literature. The results of the study indicate that philosophy of language plays an important role in expanding linguistic perspectives, especially in understanding meaning as a result of language use in social practice. Concepts such as context, speaker intention, and rules of language use are central aspects in bridging the philosophy of language and linguistics. This finding confirms that the study of meaning cannot be separated from the philosophical dimensions that underlie it. The conclusion of this study is that the integration of philosophy of language in linguistic studies provides a more comprehensive theoretical framework in understanding the meaning and use of language, making it relevant for the development of language and communication studies in the contemporary era.

Trying to understand the nature and origin of language, this inherent ability of man, has been a common concern among scientists throughout history, as the blessings of the language in the way we use it are exclusively for humans that make it human. Moreover, it is genetically distinct from other living things. The diversity of scientists' views in this area is evidence of the over-complexity of language. This point is clear both in nature and in origin, so far as linguists, philosophers, and mystics have all come to understand the answer to this perpetual question of mankind. On the other hand, the holy Qur'an has the word of God and the book of human guidance among Muslims, so we decided to search for answers to our questions in the holy Qur'an. In this study, on the one hand, we study the views of linguists and philosophers about the origin and nature of language throughout history. On the other hand, we explain what the verses of the Holy Quran have said about this. In essence, the purpose of this study was to study some of the linguistic issues from the perspective of the Holy Quran. What we eventually achieved was a confirmation of the independence of the inherent aptitude of the language from its manifestation in speech and, thus, of the lameness of the language as well. In addition, we find that the holy Qur'an introduces language as a tool of thought and reasoning and recognizes the expression of thought in language, thereby confirming the intimate connection of these two vital elements for the growing human life.

Evolutionary Linguistic Theory (ELT) is an international peer-reviewed journal intended as a platform for discussing the question of the origin and development of the language faculty understood as a specifically dedicated part of the human mind/brain and its connection with the human cognition. The specificity of the journal is to contribute to the ongoing debate on language origin from an explicitly linguistic viewpoint which examines its complex subject from a well-grounded knowledge in theoretical linguistics (with its subsystems, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, language acquisition and language change, historical linguistics and philosophy of language), and reaching out into the contiguous scientific disciplines, as psychology, philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. In the following we give a not exhaustive list of matters ELT is concerned with: The design of the language faculty The role of the lexicon in the architecture of the language faculty The role of categorization and features for the origin of language The question of protolanguage Language and thought Language, music and action from an evolutionary perspective Language and other cognitive domains like vision and spatiality from an evolutionary perspective The connection between the internal reality molded by language and the external world Language and the origin of consciousness and subjectness Language and shared intentionality Historical perspectives on the question about the origin of language

The article is devoted to the linguophilosophical concept of the outstanding Russian theorist, his-torian and philosopher of language, the largest Iranian scholar Vasily Ivanovich Abaev. The as-pects of the author’s linguophilosophical concept are presented based on two works by V.I. Abaev: “Reflection of the work of consciousness in the lexico-semantic system of language” (1970) and “Language as ideology and language as technique” (1934). In these works, he pays special atten-tion to the problem of the origin of human language. The theory of the origin of language itself, in his opinion, should be based on an optimal scientific theory that proceeds from the correct theo-retical premises and is consistent with the available empirical data. To explain the origin of a lan-guage, it is not the grammar of the language that is important, but the subject–significant vocabu-lary, as he believes that the origin of vocabulary is a single and integral problem, and the origin of grammar is inevitably divided into several particular issues. Language, according to V.I.Abaev, arose not from biological, but from the social needs of a person, from the need to relate things to their collective, to impose their own “brand” on them. Special attention is paid to the concept of ideosemantics, firstly introduced by V.I. Abaev in-to scientific circulation. He distinguishes two types of semantics: small semantics (or signal, technical), which includes a mandatory minimum of semantic functions that determine the mod-ern communicative use of the word, and large semantics, which is the sum of those concomitant cognitive and emotional representations that reflect the complex inner life of the word in its past and present. He defined this broader understanding of semantics by the term “ideosemantics”. Id-eosemantics, according to V. Abaev, is the most important criterion for the historical characteriza-tion of linguistic phenomena. V. Abaev sees the value of language at an early stage of its for-mation in its “ethnodemarkation function”. In conclusion, the article presents ideosemantic parallels in three genetically and structurally diverse languages: Ossetian, Kabardino-Circassian and Karachay-Balkar.

U radu se analizira Herderova Rasprava o porijeklu jezika. Autor određuje Herderovo mjesto u povijesti filozofije jezika. Suprotno većini autora koji su se bavili recepcijom i kritikom Herderove filozofije jezika, zaključuje da je Herder prvi mislilac koji porijeklo jezika nalazi u slobodnoj duhovnoj biti čovjeka. S te pozicije Herder provodi kritiku teološkog, naturalističkog i konvencionalističkog shvatanja pitanja o porijeklu jezika te utemeljuje vlastiti ontološki obrt od glotogonije prema filozofiji jezika u genuinom smislu.

In Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie ‘Mimologics: A Voyage into Cratylusland,’ Gérard Genette introduces his readers to a new genre of discourse that cuts across disciplinary boundaries: mimologism. Beginning with the “founding text” in Plato's Cratylus, Genette explores the twists and turns of the debate between mimeticists and conventionalists over the origin and nature of language. The terms mimologism and Cratylism describe the position of Cratylus and all those in his wake—aestheticians, poets, and philosophers of language—who believe, “rightly or wrongly,” that “there must be a relation of reflective analogy (a relation of imitation) between ‘word’ and ‘thing,‘ that motivates, or justifies, the existence and the choice of the former.” At the same time, the “Cratylian desire” for perfect harmony between word and thing expresses itself unconsciously in “reveries,” or mimologics, in which the dreamer—whether Schlegel, Renan, Proust, or Saussure—muses on the mimetic potential of language (Genette 9).