Introduction

Summary

Throughout a remarkable number of contemporary disciplines there is a vigorous interest in the questions of foundations, an interest that is by turns nervous, skeptical, and controversial. This interest is a product of numerous intellectual cycles of various wave-lengths, but certainly it represents the coincidence of both the post-structuralist skepticism of recent decades as well as a postmodern crescendo of skepticism that began with Nietzsche, if not with Romantic challenges to the Enlightenment. Thus we find today not only a postmodern culture, but also a postmodern philosophical skepticism, a hermeneutics of suspicion, which has challenged the Enlightenment legacy's progressivism, universalism, and rationalism.

Postmodern skepticism appears as a crisis, a break, and one whose reach lays claim not only to modernism, but to Western philosophy as a whole. It is a crisis, moreover, because while its roots are not new, serious challenges to the rationalist-scientific tradition of the West have remained, for much of this century, safely marginalized as the exorbitances of the poets, fideists, and nihilists. But that has changed: the anti-rationalist impetus no longer emerges solely from the academic and cultural margins, but through the very legacy of analytic philosophy itself.

The linguistic turn: philosophy discovers language

How is it that analytic philosophy came to put so much stock in the linguistic approach to philosophical problems? In philosophy's search for the foundations of knowledge, language has traditionally been thought an obstacle to something more reliable.