Indeterminacy Of Translation Heidegger Summary

Indeterminacy of Translation: A Comparative Study between Quine and Heidegger

A History of the Philosophy of Language

1.1 Ancient Greece

The earliest insight on the nature and origins of language can be found in the Plato’s Cratylus, where Socrates is asked by two men on the nature of names; whether they are “conventional” (language is a system of arbitrary signs) or “natural” (words have an intrinsic relation to the things they signify), to which Socrates agrees with the naturalistic view, based on examples of compounding, where the meaning of the whole word is related to the constituents of the word.

Aristotle on the other hand, was a supporter of the conventional origins of meaning, due to the relationship between logic and language; the Greek word for “language” and “logic reasoning” is logos. In the Categories, he enumerates the possibilities of the things that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition, placing the objects of human perception under ten categories. Furthermore, in

In three lectures called “The Nature Of Language”, he intends to bring us to face the possibility of undergoing an experience with language. He first explains that when we experience something, it means that something befalls us, overwhelms and transforms us. To experience language, means to “let ourselves be properly concerned by the claim of language by entering into and submitting to it”. Speakers of a language may become transformed by such experiences, from one day to the next or in the course of time, yet for modern man, this is too much for him, but it does draw us to the question of our relation to language. We take our capabilities to utilize language in our everyday lives for granted, for how else can we be close to it except by speaking? This relation is vague and