ABSTRACT
The modernist crisis was enabled by Frege and Husserl’s new attention to the role of language in philosophical inquiry. What was later dubbed ‘the linguistic turn’ – the recognition that an inquiry into the nature of language should become ‘first philosophy’ – was a necessary rung in the modernist ladder, and then in its disposal. What are the real consequences of the linguistic turn, then? How do philosophy and language look when the old dogmas are fully discarded? These questions cannot, I believe, be answered directly. In order to grasp the immense difficulty in replying to them, we should go back to the roots: to some of Frege and Husserl’s specific ideas which first formed the linguistic turn. It is on some of the motivations, insights and presuppositions of this turn that I wish to focus now, in order to see a little better which of them infiltrated into the modernist picture, how they were reshaped, what threads have been left out – for post-modernists to come back to and pick up. It is impossible to overcome the modernist crisis of philosophical language without first having a clear view of its source. But a view is of a viewer; in our case, these are the post-modernist Dummett and Derrida looking at the pre-modernist Frege and Husserl.
