Abstract

The Linguistic Turn had a great impact and brought about global changes in the objects, methods, and styles of many twentieth-century philosophical works. However, a considerable number of Chinese scholars and philosophers nowadays think that the Linguistic Turn has already passed. Some of them are even of the opinion that the immediate products of the Linguistic Turn, such as analytic philosophy and the philosophy of language, are by now outdated. In their view, this is an inevitable consequence of the Linguistic Turn, as this revolutionary change in philosophy was based on the inherently limited methods of mathematical logic: structural methods and greatly restricted methods of language analysis. Therefore, analytic philosophy and the philosophy of language could never resolve basic philosophical and, especially, metaphysical questions.