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How did the concept of language come to dominate modern intellectual history? In Language Alone , Geoffrey Halt Harpham provides at once the most comprehensive survey and most telling critique of the pervasive role of language in modern thought. He shows how thinkers in such diverse fields as philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology and literary theory have made progress by referring their most d... More

How did the concept of language come to dominate modern intellectual history? In Language Alone , Geoffrey Halt Harpham provides at once the most comprehensive survey and most telling critique of the pervasive role of language in modern thought. He shows how thinkers in such diverse fields as philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology and literary theory have made progress by referring their most difficult theoretical problems to what they presumed were the facts of language. Through a provocative reassessment of major thinkers on the idea of language - Saussure, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Rorty and Chomsky, among them - and detailed accounts of the discourses of ethics and ideology in particular, Harpham demonstrates a remarkable consensus among intellectuals of the past century and beyond that philosophical and other problems can be best understood as linguistic problems. Conspicuously absent from this consensus, he shows, is any consideration of contemporary linguistics, or any awareness of the growing agreement among linguists that the nature of language as such cannot be known. Ultimately, Harpham argues, the thought of language has dominated modern intellectual history because of its singular capacity to serve as proxy for a host of concerns, questions, and anxieties - our place in the order of things, our rights and obligations, our nature or essence - that resist a strictly rational formulation. Language Alone will interest critics, philosophers, and anyone with an interest in the uses of languages in contemporary thought.

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