172 / 298
Horst Steinke
172
principle of the “civic world”, language is not a part, however essential, of this
world, that is, it is not an institution alongside other institutions. The great
risk of conceiving it in this way is of understanding it as being a tool, and not
as autonomous)». See also
ibid.
, p. 284: «Il riconoscimento dell’autonomia del
linguaggio […] non resta privo di conseguenze per la filosofia (Recognition of
the autonomy of language is not without philosophical consequences)».
319
This is E. Coseriu’s view of Vico’s position in Id.,
Die Geschichte der
Sprachphilosophie von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Eine Übersicht. Teil
[
Part
]
II: Von
Leibniz bis Rousseau
, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 1972, pp. 91-97.
320
The main references are J. Hintikka,
Lingua Universalis vs. Calculus Ratioc-
inator: An Ultimate Presupposition of Twentieth-Century Philosophy,
Dordrecht-
Boston-London, Kluwer Academic, 1997, and selected contributions in
The
Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka
,
cit., including: S. Knuuttila,
Hintikka’s View of the
History of Philosophy
,
pp. 87-109; J. Hintikka,
Reply to Simo Knuuttila
, pp. 106-
112; G. Motzkin,
Hintikka’s Ideas about the History of Ideas
, pp. 113-131; H.
Sluga,
Jaakko Hintikka (And Others) on Truth
,
pp. 585-614; J. Hintikka,
Reply to
Hans Sluga
, pp. 615-624; M. Kusch,
Hintikka on Heidegger and the Universality of
Language,
pp. 713-729; J. Hintikka,
Reply to Martin Kusch
,
pp. 730-736. See also
M. Kusch,
Language as Calculus vs. Language as Universal Medium: A Study in Hus-
serl, Heidegger and Gadamer
, Dordrecht-Boston-London, Kluwer Academic,
1989, pp. 1-10.
321
With respect to the early modern period, L. Formigari noted: «For 17
th
and 18
th
century philosophers it had not been difficult to reconcile the univer-
sality of language with the variety of languages» (Id.,
A History of Language Phi-
losophies
, cit., p. 191).
322
According to V. Peckhaus, Leibniz does not use the term
lingua charac-
terica
(Id.,
Calculus Ratiocinator vs. Characteristica Universalis? The Two Traditions in
Logic Revisited,
in
Gottlob Frege: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers
, vol. 1,
ed. by M. Beaney and E. H. Reck, London-New York, Routledge, 2005, pp.
176-190, p. 179, footnote 41).
323
J. Hintikka,
Lingua universalis
, cit., p. IX: «Leibniz proposed […] a uni-
versal language of human thought whose symbolic structure would reflect di-
rectly the structure of the world of our concepts»; see also H. Sluga,
Jaakko
Hintikka (And Others) on Truth
, cit., pp. 587-588. Needless to say, this bears no
relationship to projects like the artificial language
Esperanto,
designed to re-
place natural languages as a common, “universal” means of communication.
The term “universal medium” arises also in other contexts, such as when art is
characterized, in its ubiquity, as the universal medium of personal/collective
expression. These, and other context-dependent, usages have in common
phenomenological approaches; we also include in this categorization Chom-