Dante Alighieri's argument on the question of the language stimulated the debate among fifteenth century humanists. This book provides a novel and open-ended reading of Dante's literature on language as well as a systematic reconstruction of the whole body of humanistic literature on linguistic phenomena.

Leibniz's plan to construct an ars characteristica has been known from its logical and historical aspect as a „misconception“ and as another futile effort of a whole era respectively. Our approach will be from a different point of view, making use of a certain model-theory in philosophy of science. Then the comparison between Leibniz's own plans and the Chinese script which he himself used so often as a model can here be taken seriously. It will be analysed in how far (...) this non-alphabetic script could have possessed a possible explanatory function for the problems emerging in his own project. (shrink)

A prehistory of today's humanities, from ancient Greece to the early twentieth century Many today do not recognize the word, but "philology" was for centuries nearly synonymous with humanistic intellectual life, encompassing not only the study of Greek and Roman literature and the Bible but also all other studies of language and literature, as well as history, culture, art, and more. In short, philology was the queen of the human sciences. How did it become little more than an archaic word? (...) In Philology, the first history of Western humanistic learning as a connected whole ever published in English, James Turner tells the fascinating, forgotten story of how the study of languages and texts led to the modern humanities and the modern university. The humanities today face a crisis of relevance, if not of meaning and purpose. Understanding their common origins—and what they still share—has never been more urgent. (shrink)