Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T13:02:11.920Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Language Animal: A Long Trajectory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

PAOLO COSTA
PAOLO COSTA*
Affiliation:
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento
*
*<[email protected]>
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In my paper, I set The Language Animal against a broader picture of Charles Taylor’s intellectual trajectory. Sources of the Self (1989) left open three major questions: (a) the viability of religious moral sources in a ‘secular’ age; (b) the compatibility between a robust moral realism and a genealogical account of modern identity; and (c) the meaning and destiny of the so-called ‘linguistic turn.’ This is the framing topic of his last book. Although Taylor’s variety of hermeneutics is unquestionably a product of the linguistic turn, he has operated with a broad notion of the linguistic capacity from the start. Language is, for him, a shared activity and the acknowledgment of its animal embeddedness functions in his work as an antidote against any too idealized a view of the kind of creatures that humans are. In his earlier writings, however, a structural tension lurked below the surface between a Gadamerian notion of Sprache and a more phenomenological, Merleau-Pontyan, embodied outlook that was less modelled on articulate speech. My claim is that his new book marks a shift from a more speech-oriented to a more body-oriented understanding of language.

Dans mon article, j’analyse The Language Animal sur la base d’une considération plus large de la trajectoire intellectuelle de Taylor. Les sources du moi (1989) laissait trois grandes questions en suspens : (a) la pérennité des sources morales religieuses dans un âge «séculier»; (b) la compatibilité d’un réalisme moral robuste avec un récit généalogique de l’identité moderne; (c) le sens et le destin du soi-disant «tournant linguistique». Cette dernière question est devenue la question-clé de son plus récent livre. Bien que la variété de l’herméneutique taylorienne soit incontestablement le produit du tournant linguistique, Taylor a travaillé dès le début avec une conception large de la capacité linguistique. Le langage est pour lui une activité partagée et la reconnaissance de ses origines animales joue dans son travail un rôle d’antidote contre une vue trop idéalisée du type de créature que sont les humains. Dans ses premiers écrits, cependant, se dissimulait une tension structurelle entre une notion gadamerienne de Sprache et une perspective plus phénoménologique, liée à Merlau-Ponty et à la notion de parole incarnée, moins modelée sur la parole articulée. J’avance que ce nouveau livre de Taylor marque le passage d’une conception du language axée sur la parole à une conception davantage axée sur le corps.

Keywords

neo-naturalismlinguistic turnembodimentspace of reasonseccentric positionality
Type
Special Issue: Charles Taylor’s The Language Animal
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , December 2017 , pp. 621 - 632
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abbey, Ruth 2000 Charles Taylor. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, Michael L. 2010 “Neural Reuse: A Fundamental Organizational Principle of the Brain.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4): 245–313.Google Scholar
Colagè, Ivan 2015 “The Human Being Shaping and Transcending Itself: Written Language, Brain, and Culture.” Zygon 50 (4): 1002–1021.Google Scholar
Costa, Paolo 2001 Verso un’ontologia dell’umano. Antropologia filosofica e filosofia politica in Charles Taylor. Milano: Unicopli.Google Scholar
Donald, Merlin 1991 Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Dreyfus, Hubert, and Taylor, Charles 2015 Retrieving Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heidegger, Martin 1962 Being and Time (trans. Macquarrie, John and Robinson, Edward). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Joas, Hans 2013 The Sacredness of the Person. A New Genealogy of Human Rights (trans. Skinner, Alex). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Laforest, Guy, and de Lara, Philippe (eds.) 1998 Charles Taylor et l’Interpretation de l’Identité Moderne. Sainte-Foy and Paris: Presses de L’Université Laval and Éditions du Cerf.Google Scholar
Laitinen, Arto 2008 Strong Evaluation without Moral Sources. On Charles Taylor’s Philosophical Anthropology and Ethics. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 1948 “On the Dignity of Man.” (trans. Forbes, Elizabeth L.) In: Cassirer, Ernst, Kristeller, Paul Oskar, and Randall, John Hermann Jr. (eds.), The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 223–254.Google Scholar
Plessner, Helmuth 1975 Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter (3 rd edition).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosa, Hartmut 1998 Identität und kulturelle Praxis. Politische Philosophie nach Charles Taylor. Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus Verlag.Google Scholar
Schear, Joseph K. (ed.) 2013 Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Skinner, Quentin 1994 “Modernity and Disenchantment: Some Historical Reflections.” In: Tully, James (ed.), Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism. The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 37–48.Google Scholar
Smith, Nicholas 2001 Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals, Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Spohn, Ulrike 2016 Den säkularen Staat neu denken. Politik und Religion bei Charles Taylor. Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus Verlag.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles 1967 “Relations between Cause and Action.” In: Proceedings of the Seventh Inter-American Congress of Philosophy. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 243–255.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles 1975 Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Charles 1985a Philosophical Papers I: Human Agency and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Charles 1985b Philosophical Papers II: Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles 1986 “Sprache und Gesellschaft.” In: Honneth, Axel and Joas, Hans (eds.), Kommunikatives Handeln: Beiträge zu Jürgen Habermas Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 35–52.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles 1989 Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles 1991a “Lichtung or Lebensform: Parallels between Heidegger and Wittgenstein.” In: Taylor, Charles, Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 61–78.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles 1991b “The Importance of Herder.” In: Taylor, Charles, Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 79–99.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles 1992 “Heidegger, Language, and Ecology.” In: Taylor, Charles, Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 100–126.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles 1995 Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles 1997 “Foreword.” In: Gauchet, Marcel, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (trans. Burge, Oscar). Princeton: Princeton University Press, viii-xv.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles 2004 Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press: Durham & London.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Charles 2007 A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles 2010 “Language not Mysterious?” In: Weiss, Bernhard and Wanderer, Jeremy (eds.), Reading Brandom: On Making it Explicit. London: Routledge, 32-47 (First German edition 2008: “Das Mysterium der Sprache: Robert Brandoms Sprachphilosophie,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 56(1): 3–19).Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles 2016 The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Warner, Michael, VanAntwerpen, Jonathan, and Calhoun, Craig (eds.) 2010 Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar