Grammar and Metaphysics

Abstract

How is metaphysics possible? This question can be perspicuously approached by asking, as Derrida has done, how it is possible for metaphysical remarks to be expressed, in what sort of language or medium metaphysics makes sense. To approach the question this way raises the problem about the relation of philosophy to language, whether there is a language of metaphysics, and whether what linguists have done or may do might conceivably throw light on the status of metaphysics.

We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk; so we need friction. Back to the rough ground! Wittgenstein, PI 107¹

To rob us of discourse would be to rob us of philosophy. Plato, Sophist 260A

Part of a symposium entitled “Language and Philosophy” at the meetings of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, New Orleans, 30 October 1971. The other symposiasts were Jacques Derrida (“Le supplement de copule”) and Peter Caws (“Thought, Language, and Philosophy”). Except in note 22, all references to Derrida are to this essay.