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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
We may reflect on language in different ways. There is the way familiar to analytical philosophers. That may take different forms, but most of them are strikingly different from the way of someone like Elias Canetti or F. R. Leavis, whose thought is shaped by their concern with literature. In the latter case language appears as an essentially human phenomenon, not because it is limited to the species Homo sapiens, but because it is essentially connected with the culture and histories of peoples, whose plurality is underdetermined by any elaboration on the nature and environmental conditions of Homo sapiens. It is rare to find analytical philosophers of language for whom that is important or who have tried even to sketch the kind of importance it may have. That is because they assume that it is not important to language as such (to what makes something language) but only to the sophisticated use of language in poetry or literature. They have tended to misunderstand the sense in which a language such as English is a natural language.
1 ‘Wittgenstein's Builders’ (Rhees, , 1970).Google Scholar
2 Wittgenstein writes (1946) ‘Esperanto. The feeling of disgust we get if we utter an invented word with invented derivative syllables. The word is cold, lacking in associations, and yet it plays at being “language”. A system of purely written signs would not disgust us so much’ (CV, 52).
3 Winch, Peter, ‘Eine Einstellung zur Seele’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1980). Reprinted in Winch, 1987.Google Scholar
4 For example, in On Certainty.
5 The quotation is from, Weil, Simone, ‘The Iliad: A poem of Might’ in Intimations of Christianity Amongst the Ancient Greeks (Weil, 28).Google Scholar
6 For some further development see Gaita (1990), Ch. 10.
