ABSTRACT
As long as there has been a logic and a philosophy of language, philosophical consideration has been continually preoccupied with the relationship between thinking and speech. This chapter begins with a review of the historical development that the symbolic concept gradually underwent within the theory of aphasia and by which it arrived at the central position that it currently occupies. To properly appreciate the significance of pathological experiences for the deeper cognition of the symbolic function, we must not limit ourselves to the narrow sphere of pure speech disorders. The analysis of the consciousness of objects forms one of the central and fundamental tasks of modern philosophy. Disorders of temporal and numerical consciousness point in the same direction as in disorders of spatial consciousness: they seem to be essentially grounded in the difficulty to create fixed systems of reference for the apprehension of spatial, temporal, and numerical relationships and to transition freely from one to another.
