The close connections between Husserl’s phenomenology and...

The close connections between Husserl’s phenomenology and the projects of Frege and the early Vienna Circle, the significant parallels between the analytic tradition’s midcentury critique of Cartesianism and Heidegger’s critique of subjectivism, and (above all) the common origination of all of these projects in developments of Kant’s critique of reason, all spoke for the possibility of a renewed discussion of the two traditions’ common methodological and thematic strands.

I grew convinced, at the same time, that the epochal discovery of language for philosophical criticism at the beginning of the analytic tradition gestured toward an “object” whose occurrence is too pervasive, and implications too general, in ordinary human life for its philosophical relevance to be limited to a specialized consideration of the conceptual problems of scientific knowledge or a mere systematization of pre-existing or commonsensical “intuitions.” Continental philosophers, largely unschooled in the methods of analysis, clarification, and criticism deriving from Frege, might see formally based reflection on language as irrelevant to a larger consideration of the problems of meaning and existence; analytic philosophers might continue to dismiss these problems themselves as too vague and intractable.

Even within the analytic tradition itself, the question of language, once opened for philosophical reflection, has again and again subsequently been partially or wholly concealed or obscured, dissimulated and repressed.

It nevertheless remains possible, in a broader historical context, as I have attempted to show herein, to grasp the analytic tradition’s inquiry into language as one of the most complete and radical developments of philosophy’s continuing critical encounter with what was long ago grasped as logos , and brought down through the ages as reason and ratio , the immanent form of thought and the order of the world.

Another origin of this book came later, in my reading, in graduate school, of contemporary texts that seek to theorize and account for the regularities and norms of meaningful language. These texts, more or less universally, presupposed a conception of language as grounded in intersubjective “social practices” controlled by public criteria of application and evaluation.