On the Paradigm of Language: Positivism and Hermeneutics as Theories of Objectivation

Abstract

Twentieth century academic philosophy — if one can speak about it in singular at all — represents a paradoxical picture. After more than one hundred years of an unbroken tradition when — following Kant — each self-respecting philosopher had to and did announce at least one Copernican or post-Copernican revolution in philosophy, the tone of philosophical discourse is becoming more and more disillusioned and resigned. It no more declares the birth of a new ‘strict science’ which would finally end all the barren disputes and open the path to an unbroken progress in philosophy, but calls us to a ‘return to the sources’, even ‘back to the Pre-Socratics’. This conservative facade, however, hides a sharp break with some of the most essential elements of the whole philosophical tradition of modernity, a break which even the most liberal imagination would find difficult to connect in its intellectual content with Greek antiquity. If this break now appears not under the slogan of a revolt against a tradition, but as the resurrection of an older one, this tells perhaps more about the place and attitude of academic philosophy in the world of today than about its theoretical and ideological portent.