The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England: John Wilkins and the Universal Character (original) (raw)
Related papers
Mind, Vol. 115, 458, April 2006, 444-447, 2006
Adventuring in Dictionaries: New Studies in the History of Lexicography, 2010
In Chapter 5, Fredric Dolezal examines the work of the English contemporaries of Borel’s whose place in lively intellectual exchange is most evident: John Wilkins and William Lloyd, respectively the leading author of the Essay towards a real character and the philosophical language of 1668, and the provider of “continual assistance” to Wilkins, most notably the compilation (partly from bilingual English-Latin dictionaries) of an “Alphabetical dictionary” to stand beside the philosophical Tables of the Essay. The philosophical language on which Wilkins and Lloyd worked had to analyse English lexical items rationally before providing them with equivalents. As Wilkins remarked, a verb such as set, taken together with all the phrasal verbs formed from it like set up, set down, and set out, may have more than 100 senses; for his purposes, this meant the concept denoted by its various senses might have a great many different places in his system. Dolezal discusses Wilkins and Lloyd’s responses to the challenge, with particular attention to their lexicographical metalanguage and its implications, concluding with the argument that the “Alphabetical dictionary” is a “compendium of the many possibilities of lexicography” which from its publication invited its readers take part in intellectual exchange. The physical bulk and excellent typography of the Essay sometimes tends to obscure the point of its title: that Wilkins and Lloyd really were essaying ideas, trying them out. –John Considine (xiii-xiv), Adventuring in Dictionaries, 2010.
Revista Española de Filosofía Medieval
The paper presents evidence that Roger Bacon was endeavoring to structure what he considered as a “new metaphysics”. Moreover, it identifies the Opus maius as Bacon’s new preliminary text in metaphysics and morals. The evidence is found in the Communia naturalium and in the Communia mathematica, in which one finds a reference to the Opus maius as a sketch for a new metaphysics. From part seven of the latter work, namely, the Moralis philosophia, one can see that Bacon views the latter work as closely connected to his new metaphysics. In fact, the material in the Communia mathematica connects his studies on languages to the communication of his moral vision. I present a review of the sources for the different parts of the Opus maius. This is followed by an account of Bacon’s philosophical sources. It becomes clear that Bacon was acquainted with Plato’s Meno, Phaedo and part of the Timaeus with Calcidius’s Commentary. The variety and significance of his Neo-Platonic sources are outlin...
Signs of Light: French and British Theories of Linguistic Communication, 1648-1789
French History, 2012
Many have studied 17th-18th-century European linguistic ideas. Most, Matthew Lauzun recalls, have focused on issues of expressive clarity and conceptual fidelity. Port-Royal, Locke and Condillac hold centre stage for scholars exploring how language was held to relate to thought and what dilemmas arose from their interplay. Wilkins, Dalgarno and Leibniz do for those drawn to efforts to construct a language to express concepts as if unmediated because its syntax would duplicate their parts and structure. By mid-17th century, philologists mostly fixed on improving their vernaculars, held much responsible for current social and political ills, doing so either from within (Port-Royal and the rest) or without (Wilkins et al., but others like Kircher or missionaries who thought to find existing linguistic forms-Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese ideograms or American graphs-that already embodied their expressive and conceptual ideals).
This paper examines the account of ordinary language semantics developed by Franz Brentano and his pupil Anton Marty. Long before the interest in ordinary language in the analytic tradition, Brentanian philosophers were exploring our everyday use of words, as opposed to the scientific use of language. Brentano and Marty were especially interested in the semantics of (common) names in ordinary language. They claimed that these names are vague, and that this is due to the structure of the concepts that constitute their meaning: concepts expressed by such names are themselves vague, based on typicality, and have more or less similar items within their extension. After presenting the views of Brentano and Marty, this paper compares them to later accounts of meaning and concepts, notably Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblances and the prototype theory of concepts, and emphasizes the originality of the Brentanian position.