Linguistic Turns in Modern Philosophy (The Evolution of Modern Philosophy) by Michael Losonsky

ISBN: 9780521654708

Cambridge University Press | 16 January 2006

Paperback | 294 pages

This book traces the linguistic turns in the history of modern philosophy and the development of the philosophy of language from John Locke to Ludwig Wittgenstein. It examines the contributions of key figures such as Leibniz, J.S. Mill, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, W.V.O. Quine, and Donald Davidson, as well as voices including Condillac, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Noam Chomsky, and Jacques Derrida. Losonsky argues that philosophy of language begins with Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and shows how the field has been shaped by an ongoing tension between formal and pragmatic perspectives on language — language as a syntactic and semantic system versus language as a human activity — and how this tension has driven philosophical development throughout the modern period.