The concept of Geist – mind or spirit – plays a central, indeed dominant, role in Hegel’s philosophy. But the concept seems to me to be very different in both its origin and its character than it is commonly taken to be. So I would like here to try to shed some light on both of these aspects.

The nineteenth century was a great age of advances in the writing of history of philosophy. These advances were largely achieved in Germany. The ground for them had already been prepared by eighteenth-century historians of philosophy there, especially Brucker and Tiedemann, who had both been inspired by the Leibniz-Wolff tradition’s rationalist philosophy. With the advent toward the end of the eighteenth century of a new and even greater age in German philosophy, writers of history of philosophy were inspired to reach new heights on the basis of those earlier preparations. In doing so, they were also supported by a broader concern with history, especially the history of culture, and a broader development of historical and interpretive methods that emerged in Germany during the same period. This chapter will attempt to give an account of the main advances that were achieved.

KANT, HEGEL, AND “OFFICIAL” HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

A fairly conventional account of the writing of history of philosophy in the nineteenth century might go roughly as follows.

The two most famous philosophers from around the beginning of the century – Kant (1724–1804) and Hegel (1770–1831) – were also in a sense the century's greatest contributors to writing the history of the discipline. Kant, though not himself very deeply concerned with the history of philosophy, nonetheless paid significant attention to it (for example, in the Critique of Pure Reason from 1781/7; the Logic lectures, a version of which he published in 1800; and the Prize Essay concerning progress in metaphysics since Leibniz and Wolf , which was written in 1791 and published in 1804).

This chapter focuses on nineteenth-century philosophy of language, conceived broadly in chronology but more narrowly in theme (for the most part, developments that occurred in such closely related fields as linguistics and formal logic have been bracketed out).

Nineteenth-century philosophy of language emerged from the background of a revolution in thinking about the subject that had taken place in eighteenth-century Germany, overturning standard Enlightenment preconceptions. Herder (1744–1803) and to a lesser extent Hamann (1730–88) were the main protagonists of this revolution. Among the revolutionary principles they championed, the following are most important:

1. Thought is essentially dependent on and bounded by language – that is, one can only think if one has a language, and one can only think what one can express linguistically. (Let us call this the thought-language principle.)

2. Meanings or concepts consist, not in the sorts of items, in principle independent of language, with which much of the philosophical tradition has equated them – for example, referents, Platonic forms, or the mental “ideas” favored by the British Empiricists and others – but in word-usages. (Let us call this the meaning-usage principle.)

3. Meanings or concepts are of their very nature based in (perceptual and affective) sensations – though this grounding can involve metaphorical extensions, and in the case of human beings a converse dependence (of sensations on concepts) holds as well. (Let us call this the meaning-sensation principle.)

4. Reference to particulars is never direct but is always mediated by general concepts, or “universals.” (Let us call this the principle of indirect reference.)

5. Mankind exhibits deep linguistic and conceptual-intellectual diversities, especially between different historical periods and cultures, but even to some extent between individuals living within a single period and culture. (Let us call this the diversity principle.)

6. Language – and hence also thought, human mental life more generally, and indeed the very self – is fundamentally social in nature. (Let us call this the language-sociality principle.)

7. Metaphysical philosophy is largely the product of confusions about language – in particular, disregard of principles (1), (2), and (3). (Let us call this the principle of metaphysics as linguistic confusion.)

8. …