IL LINGUAGGIO NELLA PROSPETTIVA TRASCENDENTALE: UNA RIFLESSIONE SU OSCURAMENTO E DIFFERIMENTO DEL PROBLEMA (1795-1851)

Language in Transcendental Perspective: A Reflection on the Obscuration and Deferral of the Problem (1795-1851). Although it was a specific topic of reflection for the philosophers of German Idealism (Fichte, Schelling), language was not thematized in a strictly transcendental sense, that is, in relation to the conditions of possibility of knowledge. In contrast to Humboldt, who had first raised the question of the relationship between thought and language, and who had attempted to conceive of their close interaction by placing objectivity itself in a communicative context of a triadic type, their attention was dominated by the problem of the origin of language: a problem that had aroused great interest in the second half of the eighteenth century, but which was eventually exhausted on the philosophical level, at the same time as the emergence of the comparative orientation in the linguistic one, initiated by the revelation of Sanskrit, which prompted the “reconstruction of a ‘primitive’ state of language”.