Philosophical Languages In The Seventeenth Century

This book discusses three linguistic projects carried out in the seventeenth century: the artificial languages created by Dalgamo and Wilkins, and Leibniz's uncompleted scheme. It treats each of the projects as self contained undertakings, which deserve to be studied and judged in their own right. For this reason, the two artificial languages, as well as Leib niz's work in this area, are described in considerable detail. At the same time, the characteristics of these schemes are linked with their intellectual context, and their multiple interrelations are examined at some length. In this way, the book seeks to combine a systematical with a historical ap proach to the subject, in the hope that both approaches profit from the combination. When I first started the research on which this book is based, I intended to look only briefly into the seventeenth-century schemes, which I assumed represented a typical universalist approach to the study of lan guage, as opposed to a relativistic one. The authors of these schemes thought, or so the assumption was, that almost the only thing required for a truly universal language was the systematic labelling of the items of an apparently readily available, universal catalogue of everything that exists.

That saving form of knowledge, as it develops in the lines of linguistic thought that extend from Bacon's Instauration to Wilkins's Philosophical Language, is both a product of and one potent agent in producing the emerging, scientistically designed, modern state.

The focus of this volume is the crisis of the traditional view of the relationship between words and things and the emergence of linguistic arbitrarism in 17th-century British philosophy. Different groups of sources are explored: philological and antiquarian writings, pedagogical treatises, debates on the respective merits of the liberal and mechanical arts, essays on cryptography and the art of gestures, polemical pamphlets on university reform, universal language scheme, and philosophical analyses of the conduct of the understanding. In the late 17th-century the philosophy of mind discards both the correspondence of predicamental series to reality and the archetypal metaphysics underpinning it. This is a turning point in semantic theory: language is conceived as the social construction of historical-conventional objects through signs and the study of strategies we use to bridge the gap between the privacy of experience and the publicness of speech emerges as one of the main topics in the philosophy of language.

In a powerful and original contribution to the history of ideas, Hannah Dawson explores the intense preoccupation with language in early-modern philosophy, and presents an analysis of John Locke's critique of words. By examining a broad sweep of pedagogical and philosophical material from antiquity to the late seventeenth century, Dr Dawson explains why language caused anxiety in various writers. Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy demonstrates that developments in philosophy, in conjunction with weaknesses in linguistic theory, resulted in serious concerns about the capacity of words to refer to the world, the stability of meaning, and the duplicitous power of words themselves. Dr Dawson shows that language so fixated all manner of early-modern authors because it was seen as an obstacle to both knowledge and society. She thereby uncovers a novel story about the problem of language in philosophy, and in the process reshapes our understanding of early-modern epistemology, morality and politics.

Examines highly regarded proposals during the seventeenth century for an artificial language intended to replace Latin as the international medium of communication.

In this reader, 19 articles have been collected that bring out the central position of John Wilkins and his Essay Toward a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) in the history of ideas in 17th-century Britain.

Galileo’s dictum that the book of nature “is written in the language of mathematics” is emblematic of the accepted view that the scientific revolution hinged on the conceptual and methodological integration of mathematics and natural philosophy. Although the mathematization of nature is a distinctive and crucial feature of the emergence of modern science in the seventeenth century, this volume shows that it was a far more complex, contested, and context-dependent phenomenon than the received historiography has indicated, and that philosophical controversies about the implications of mathematization cannot be understood in isolation from broader social developments related to the status and practice of mathematics in various commercial, political, and academic institutions. Contributors: Roger Ariew, U of South Florida; Richard T. W. Arthur, McMaster U; Lesley B. Cormack, U of Alberta; Daniel Garber, Princeton U; Ursula Goldenbaum, Emory U; Dana Jalobeanu, U of Bucharest; Douglas Jesseph, U of South Florida; Carla Rita Palmerino, Radboud U, Nijmegen and Open U of the Netherlands; Eileen Reeves, Princeton U; Christopher Smeenk, Western U; Justin E. H. Smith, U of Paris 7; Kurt Smith, Bloomsburg U of Pennsylvania.