Kant on Language

Addresses the linguistic ramifications of Kant's thought and investigates his views on language from unique perspectives.

Kant had thoughts on language, but his account of language is not explicit and cannot be found in any dedicated section of his works, so it needs to be philosophically reconstructed. The chapters in this volume investigate Kant's views on language from unique perspectives. They demonstrate that Kant's notions of thinking, knowing, communicating, and acting have implications for the philosophy of language: from the problem of empirical concept-formation to the categorial structure of experience, from the exhibition of aesthetic ideas to the role of analogies and metaphors, from poetry as the art of language to the moral relevance of rhetoric and the problem of persuasion, and from the source of Kant's philosophical vocabulary to the role of language in defining 'humanity'. The volume offers a new and distinctive interpretive context in which Kant's approach to language can be critically appreciated.