The new philosophy and universal languages in seventeenth-century England: Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins By Robert E. Stillman (review)

Abstract

370LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) REFERENCES Carden, Guy. 1970. A note on conflicting idiolects. Linguistic Inquiry 1.281-90. Garnsey, Susan M. 1993. Event-related brain potentials in the study oflanguage: An introduction. Language and Cognitive Processes 8.337-556. Labov, William. 1966. On the grammaticality of every-day speech. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, New York. -----. 1975. Empirical foundations of linguistic theory. The scope of American linguistics, ed. by Robert Austerlitz, 77-134. Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press. Quirk, Randolph, and Ian Svartvik. 1966. Investigating linguistic acceptability. The Hague: Mouton. 5452 Barton Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90038 [bwald@humnet.ucla.edu] The new philosophy and universal languages in seventeenth-century England: Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins. By Robert E. Stillman. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995. Pp. 359. Reviewed by Joseph L. Subbiondo, Saint Mary's College of California While historians of linguistics increasingly demonstrate the legitimacy of Geertz' 1980 'genre mixing', Stillman stands apart from most of his contemporaries. With rare depth and breadth, he blends critical theory, linguistics, literature, history, political science, and rhetoric into a compelling study of the relationship among science, philosophical language, and politics in seventeenth century England. He draws on a full range of scholarship—he includes the works not only of prominent historians of seventeenth-century universal language (e.g. Cohen 1977, Knowlson 1975, Salmon 1972, and Slaughter 1982) but also of major critical theorists (e.g. Fish 1972, Foucault 1973, Lacan 1977, and Rorty 1979). He is so adept in making a case from the scholarship of traditionally disparate fields that it is difficult to think of writing a credible history of a complex subject any other way. Clearly, S provides a fresh view regarding his subject by advancing the standard of cross-disciplinary scholarship in linguistic historiography. Throughout his study, S carefully documents his thesis that Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Wilkins 'comprise three paradigmatic examples whereby new philosophies intervene against cultural crises on behalf of sovereign authorities' (264). He contends that his three central subjects consciously attempted to preserve the monarchy of seventeenth-century England through their work in science, philosophy, and language. S's position is unique in that he alone asserts that the English new science and universal language movements were explicitly motivated by a conservative political goal. S begins his history with John Amos Comenius, a seventeenth-century Czech educational reformer who championed the virtues of a universal language by advocating the notion that a mastery of language leads to a mastery of history. In fact, Comenius was invited to England in 1641 by the leaders of the universal language movement. Drawing on Comenius's extensive canon as the principal inspiration for the English universal language movement, S evenly divides his attention among his three subjects. He concludes the study with an overview in which he summarizes his central thesis that Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins believed that 'a more perfect language comprises both a model and a means for achieving a more perfect philosophy, and that philosophy, in tum, a vehicle for perfecting political authority in the state' (263). S insists that an understanding of the philosophical projects of Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins requires knowledge of the broad political climate of seventeenth-century England with its loss and restoration of the monarchy as well as the narrow ideal of the universal language movement with its focus on plain expression. He advances his position by claiming that 'plotting the narrative of new philosophies against the narrative of England's political history is crucial not merely for REVIEWS371 rendering those discourses historically intelligible, but also for understanding crucial transformations in the state itself, especially those later in the seventeenth-century' (14). In Part One, 'Bacon and the advent of universal languages' (55-112), S contends that by focusing on the relationship of the word to its referent, Bacon was the first in England to argue that a universal language could bring rationality back to language. Bacon believed that a universal language free of ambiguity would allow its speakers to return from the chaos of Babel to the knowledge of Eden (see Subbiondo 1992). As he analyzes the main events of Bacon...