In a series of lectures on German philosophy ‘since Kant’, the names of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel and their critical reference to Kant are, of course, a must. No less a must, though, would seem to be Wilhelm von Humboldt, a philosopher and linguist who, together with Herder and Hamann, formed the alliterating triumvirate of a romanticist critique of Kant. The response, within the discipline, to transcendental philosophy from this side was, in contrast to the idealistic mainstream, long in the coming but, in the end, rich in consequences. It was Heidegger who, looking back at Humboldt, and informed by the Humboldtian tradition of linguistics, first recognised the paradigmatic character of hermeneutics as continued by Dilthey. At about the same time, Wittgenstein, in turn, discovered a new philosophical paradigm in Gottlob Frege's logical semantics. What later was called the ‘linguistic turn’ thus came about in a hermeneutic and an analytic version.

My interest here is to see how these two relate to each other. I will look upon it, however, from a special angle. The tension between Critical Rationalism and Critical Theory which, in the early 1960s, vented itself in the polemics between Popper and Adorno, concealed another opposition with political as well as philosophical connotations.