ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues conversely that the 'idea of the university' cannot be divorced from certain other regulative ideas, that is to say, 'ideas of reason which may not be fully realised in any existing university — or other institution — but which all the same possess a validity transcending particular circumstances of time and place. It remains for the author to give more substance to the claim that these technical-sounding issues in philosophy of language are closely bound up with issues of intellectual, ethical, and socio-political responsibility. Similar issues arise with regard to the notion of inter-disciplinarity, an idea that is nowadays very often construed as a call to sink the differences between disciplines, e.g., between historiography and literary theory, or philosophy and the sociology of knowledge, or the physical sciences and 'science studies' as a sub-branch of cultural criticism.
