Language and Experience in 20th Century Philosophy

Since the late nineteenth century much philosophy has been dominated by the so-called ‘linguistic turn’, according to which central questions in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics need to be examined through the lens of language: this involves both paying attention to our ordinary ways of speaking and investigating in a relatively a priori way the logic or grammar of our language.

Moral sciences group photo at Cambridge

We are interested in different aspects of this tendency, from both a systematic and a historical point of view. We wish to connect modern philosophy of language with pre-modern and post-Kantian thought. We focus on foundational figures, such as Frege, Brentano, Russell, and Wittgenstein, as well as later thinkers such as the members of the 'Wartime Quartet' (G. E. M. Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch), W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty, Cora Diamond, Alvin Plantinga, and John McDowell. Our group also has expertise on systematic and historical aspects of linguistic idealism, connection between experience and language, the unity and temporality of consciousness, as well as late 19th and early 20th century philosophers interested in these issues, such as Brentano, Stern, James, Hodgson, Bergson, Russell and C.D. Broad. 

The Women in Parenthesis Research Project is co-located in Liverpool and Durham. It conducts and supports scholarly work, philosophical engagement and projects on the Wartime Quartet of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch as well as connected figures such as Susan Stebbing and Dorothy Emmet. This work has a feminist component, celebrating and foregrounding the first generations of female philiosophy professors in Britain. 

One important aspect of the metaphysics of the Quartet is its rootedness in pre-modern philosophy, in particular, in the work of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Aquinas. Researchers at Liverpool are studying these links, along with other connections between pre-modern and early analytic philosophy. Questions include: what happens to Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘grammar’ when it is read against these traditions? How can ancient conceptions of the self, substance, agency, causation, ethics and human nature be re-animated after the ‘linguistic turn’? What connections are there between medieval theories of complexe significabilia and the treatment of the nature and unity of the proposition in early analytic thought? 

Members 

Richard Gaskin, Rachael Wiseman, Sorin Baiasu, Barry Dainton, Nikos Gkogkas, Stephen McLeod, Yiota Vassilopoulou, Tom Whyman 

Affiliated Members 

Siobhan Chapman, Ian Dunbar 

PhD researchers

Sam Cooper, Gary Jones, Daniel Sim 

Activities

G. E. M. Anscombe Reading Group; Women in Parenthesis Seminar Series 

Associated research centre

Women In Parenthesis Research Centre 

Back to: Department of Philosophy