Learning Outcomes:

Learning Aims
To enable students to participate in scholarship in the history of philosophy, including understanding the aims and methods of such scholarship, by engaging with questions in the history of philosophy of language.

At the end of this course students will be able to:

Describe debates in the philosophy of mind and language in 17th and 18th century Europe.
Critically evaluate arguments and positions in the philosophy of mind and language in 17th and 18th century Europe.
Critically evaluate interpretive arguments in the secondary literature on early modern philosophy.
Defend their own positions on disputed interpretive questions regarding the early modern figures discussed.

Indicative Module Content:

Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) was a polemical Jansenist theologian and Augustinian-Cartesian philosopher. Together with his collaborators, Claude Lancelot and Pierre Nicole, at Port-Royal Abbey in France, Arnauld developed an influential theory of mind and language. This theory is mainly presented in two works, the Port-Royal Grammar (1660) and the Port-Royal Logic (1662). According to this theory, there are innate universal structures in the human mind prior to language and these structures are reflected in the grammars of human languages. (Noam Chomsky has argued that the Port-Royal Grammar can be seen as a predecessor to his own work in linguistics which also attempts to derive grammatical structure from universal innate mental structures.) We will focus on the relationship between language and ideas, beliefs, and reasoning in the Logic.

The Port-Royal theory was built on a Cartesian theory of ideas as non-imagistic conceptions innate to the pure intellect (independent of the senses). In Book III of his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689), John Locke attempted to sever the Port-Royal theory from these Cartesian roots in order to develop an empiricist theory of language. He took this theory to have important consequences for the theory of classification (natural kinds) in science, and for the nature and limits of religious belief.


Following the publication of Locke's Essay, the Irish philosopher John Toland published a notorious and immediately controversial book, Christianity Not Mysterious(1696), in which he argued that it followed from Locke's theory that certain religious sentences, such as those used in Trinitarian theology, were meaningless and so could not actually express beliefs. In Ireland and elsewhere a variety of responses to Toland were published. By far the most famous of these was due to George Berkeley. Only recently, in the work of David Berman and others, has it been recognized that the Introduction to Berkeley's Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) is intended in part as a response to Toland. In a later work, Alciphron, Berkeley responds to Toland more explicitly.

Berkeley's general strategy is to argue that words can be meaningful, and express genuine beliefs, without corresponding to ideas. Some commentators have argued that Berkeley provides a 'use theory' of language, similar to the later Wittgenstein. We will discuss how Berkeley addresses these issues in the manuscript and published versions of the Introduction to the Principles and in the seventh dialogue of Alciphron. (The original of the manuscript version of the Introduction is held by TCD's Old Library.)

Student Effort Type	Hours
Lectures	22
Autonomous Student Learning	3
Total	25

Not applicable to this module.

Not applicable to this module.
 

Assessment Strategy  

Description	Timing		Component Scale		% of Final Grade
Essay: Essay on a topic relevant to Philosophy of Language in the analytic tradition. The length and title to be decided by the course provider in the Department of Philosophy, Trinity College Dublin.	End of trimester MCQ	n/a	Graded	No	100

 

Remediation Type	Remediation Timing
In-Module Resit	Prior to relevant Programme Exam Board

• Feedback individually to students, post-assessment

Not yet recorded.

Suggested Preliminary Reading
Ian Hacking, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975): Part A.

Primary Texts
Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole. Logic or the Art of Thinking: Containing besides common rules, several new observations appropriate for forming judgments. Edited and translated by Jill Vance Buroker. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. (1662; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

John Locke. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch (1690; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975)

George Berkeley, George Berkeley’s Manuscript Introduction: An Editio Diplomatica. Edited by Bertil Belfrage (Oxford: Doxa, 1987)

George Berkeley, Philosophical Writings. Edited by Desmond M. Clarke. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Secondary Literature
As advised by lecturer during lecture series.