Lingua Universalis vs. Calculus Ratiocinator:: An Ultimate Presupposition of Twentieth-Century Philosophy (Jaakko Hintikka Selected Papers, 2) - Hardcover

Hintikka, Jaakko

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0792342461 ISBN 13: 9780792342465

Publisher: Springer, 1996

Synopsis

R. G. Collingwood saw one of the main tasks of philosophers and of historians of human thought in uncovering what he called the ultimate presuppositions of different thinkers, of different philosophical movements and of entire eras of intellectual history. He also noted that such ultimate presuppositions usually remain tacit at first, and are discovered only by subsequent reflection. Collingwood would have been delighted by the contrast that constitutes the overall theme of the essays collected in this volume. Not only has this dichotomy ofviews been one ofthe mostcrucial watersheds in the entire twentieth-century philosophical thought. Not only has it remained largely implicit in the writings of the philosophers for whom it mattered most. It is a truly Collingwoodian presupposition also in that it is not apremise assumed by different thinkers in their argumentation. It is the presupposition of a question, an assumption to the effect that a certain general question can be raised and answered. Its role is not belied by the fact that several philosophers who answered it one way or the other seem to be largely unaware that the other answer also makes sense - if it does. This Collingwoodian question can be formulated in a first rough approximation by asking whether language - our actual working language, Tarski's "colloquiallanguage" - is universal in the sense of being inescapable. This formulation needs all sorts of explanations, however.

About this title

About the Author

Jaakko Hintikka is the author or co-author of thirty volumes and of some 300 scholarly articles in mathematical and philosophical logic, epistemology, language theory, philosophy of science, history of ideas and history of philosophy, including Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Peirce, The Bloomsbury Group, Husserl and Wittgenstein. He has also been active in international scholarly organizations, most recently as the First Vice-President of FISP, Vice-President of IIP and Co-Chair of the American Organizing Committee of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal Synthese and the Managing Editor of Synthese Library since 1965.

From the Back Cover

The essays collected here explore a fundamental contrast between two overall visions of language and its availability to self-examination. They can be characterized as "language as the universal medium" and "language as calculus" (or the model-theoretical view). The former normally includes the ineffability of semantics and a one-world ontology. This contrast has dominated twentieth-century philosophy but has scarcely been acknowledged before. Tarski's famous result concerning the indefinability of truth seems to decide the issue in favor of the universalists. Hintikka nevertheless shows that Tarski's result is inconclusive and that truth can in fact be defined in languages which are in certain respects comparable to ordinary language. This unique volume is a must for every contemporary philosopher and for everyone interested in the semantics of our language.

Edition details

• Publisher: Springer
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0792342461
• ISBN 13: 9780792342465
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 292