Gadamer and Wittgenstein on the Unity of Language: Reality and Discourse without Metaphysics

by Patrick Rogers Horn

Overview

In this innovative comparison of Gadamer and Wittgenstein, the author explores their common concern with the relation of language to reality. Patrick Horn's starting point is the widely accepted view that both philosophers rejected a certain metaphysical account of that relation in which reality determines the nature of language. Horn proceeds to argue that Gadamer never completely escaped metaphysical assumptions in his search for the unity of language. In this respect, argues Horn, Gadamer's work is nearer to the earlier rather than to the later Wittgenstein. The final chapter of the book highlights the work of Wittgenstein’s pupil Rush Rhees, who shows that Wittgenstein's own later emphasis on language games, while doing justice to the variety of language, does less than justice to the dialogical relation between speakers of a language, wherein the unity of language resides. Contrasting Rhees's account of the unity of language with those given by Gadamer and the early Wittgenstein brings out the importance of understanding reality in terms of the life that people share rather than in terms of what philosophers say about reality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781351935050
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/02/2017
Series:	Ashgate Wittgensteinian Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	152
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Patrick Rogers Horn is Associate Dean and Assistant Professor at the School of Religion, Claremont Graduate University, USA.

Table of Contents

Contents: Introduction; Prejudices as conditions of understanding; Historicity: limit or limitation?; Universal hermeneutics; Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the unity of a calculus; Rush Rhees and the unity of a life; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

’Horn's book is the next generation of scholarship on Wittgenstein and Gadamer, a thoughtful critique of specific positions taken by hermeneutic philosophy presented in the context of analytical inquiry more careful now to call itself, at least on some levels and to some degree, as much ally as foe.’ Philosophical Investigations

From the Publisher