Kursinformation

It is a natural thought that the relation between names and the things they name is arbitrary: we could have called the things by any names, and we happen to have chosen these. But can we actually understand this idea? We shall discuss this question by reading Plato’s Cratylus -- perhaps the first ever work of the philosophy of language. In so doing, we shall be led to ask a further and no less fundamental question: are names themselves things, of a certain kind, or are they on a different plane? We shall explore the thought that the idea of a thing, of a certain kind, is the idea of something that falls under a certain determination of the category of substance -- an object of consciousness, in this sense -- whereas the idea of a name is not the idea of an object of consciousness at all, but the idea of an element of self-consciousness. We shall develop this idea by relating Plato’s dialogue to certain themes in analytical philosophy and in German Idealism.