Seminar: Language and Philosophy [Winter 2026]

Language—alongside the questions of space and time—has emerged in the last century as an indispensable inquiry for understanding human beings. Language constitutes a lived milieu irreducible to quantitative dimensions, and in its immeasurability it seems to open up further dimensions of human experience. Well before the “linguistic turn” of the early twentieth century, figures such as Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt emphasized that speech is the key to deciphering human nature. Their insights, initially overshadowed by Enlightenment rationalism, set the stage for the later scientific study of linguistics and for philosophy’s renewed emphasis on language as a primary object of inquiry.

Across the twentieth century, both major philosophical traditions converged on language: analytic philosophy through Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, logical positivism, and speech-act theory; continental philosophy through Heidegger, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction, while Peirce’s realist semiotics provided an alternative path. By mid-century, it had become clear that language is not a peripheral cultural artifact but a constitutive condition of thought, meaning, and human community.

The seminar will thus situate language alongside other irreducible fundamentals—consciousness, personhood, religion, and culture—but focus upon the nature of language itself, as something preeminently human. It will examine language as the mediating link between nature and culture, the defining characteristic that makes the human being a “language animal,” and the condition that allows us to inhabit both material and immaterial dimensions of existence.