Hegel's Philosophy of Language

(Hardback)

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In this bold new book, Jim Vernon develops the general theory of language implicitly contained in the writings of G.W.F. Hegel. Vernon offers novel readings of Hegel's central works in order to explain his views on some long neglected topics and as such demonstrates that his accounts of representation, the concept and the speculative sentence can be used to create sophisticated theories of language acquisition, universal grammar and linguistic practice. Hegel's defence of a scientific philosophy that is necessary and universal seems to eliminate the need for a philosophical linguistics. Since thought is demonstrably objective in itself, questions about the language through which it is expressed appear to be external to philosophy. This has caused many commentators to neglect the real problems that the historical and cultural associations of language pose for the adequate expression of universal thought. Others, exploiting this apparent inadequacy, have argued that the lack of rigorous linguistic analysis in Hegel's philosophy is its greatest, and perhaps fatal, flaw. Although the very idea of a Hegelian linguistics is controversial, this book argues that there are resources within the texts of Hegel for developing a general theory of language as the reciprocal grounding of a universal grammatical form and a particular lexical content. Moreover, it uses this theory to resolve the apparent tension between the necessity of Hegelian philosophy and the contingency of its linguistic expression. In the light of Hegel's critical relation to contemporary debates in Continental and Anglo-American philosophy, coupled with the central role that philosophy of language plays in both streams, this important new study offers the first comprehensive, integrated and fully developed analysis of Hegel's theory of language.

Reviews

[Vernon] seeks, in an admirably direct and focused way, to provide a cogent account of language that at once bases itself on some of Hegel's more important passages on this topic, attempts to remain true to Hegel's overall philosophical project, and supplies some of the important connective tissue that Hegel himself either omitted or merely glossed ... Vernon's work is an important one in numerous ways, not the least of which is presenting a clear marker, up to this point lacking, against which subsequent discussions of Hegel's linguistic views can be assessed ... any future consideration of the theme of language in Hegel must take Jim Vernon's work as an indispensable reference point.' -- Jere O'Neill Surber, University of Denver * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *

Author Bio

Jim Vernon is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at York University, Canada. He has published a number of articles in leading Philosophy journals and has contributed a chapter to Hegel and Language, ed. Surber, forthcoming from SUNY Press (2006).