Linguistic Turn
Intellectual History
This is also to some extent the noble dream of the German approach to intellectual history that succeeded old-fashioned Geistesgeschichte or Ideengeschichte (history of thought, history of ideas). Like the French mentalités, German "history of concepts" (Begriffsgeschichte) is an effort to reconstruct an intellectual field through the history of terms and families of terms like the English study of "keywords." In fact Begriffsgeschichte is a species of cultural history focusing on semantic change and the social and political context of ideas, and its program depends on metahistorical considerations to determine the meanings behind the keywords being analyzed. This enterprise began in the early 1970s, before databases like Proteus and ARTFL made possible a much more extensive searching of semantic fields, but it has nonetheless greatly enriched the practices of intellectual and social history.
The linguistic turn in women's studies allowed for the awareness of gender constructs throughout historical records as well as in the limited questions of historians. Words such as masculinity, femininity, and androgyny became keywords as gender studies scholars began new inquiries into the history of ideas. A last new frontier of intellectual history at the end of the twentieth century is the effort to understand cultures not only past but also alien. Philosophy has not been much concerned with alterity, what Michel de Certeau calls "heterology," which has been faced by historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, mythographers, and other outward-and backward-looking scholars. "The course of history does not show us the Becoming of things foreign to us," argued Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "but the Becoming of ourselves and of our knowledge." But the hermeneutical philosophy of his contemporary Schleiermacher sought the thou as well as the I—the Other as well as the We—and this aim has been carried on and intensified by more recent followers. It is here that the methods of "anthropology," which had been found suspect by Immanuel Kant and Foucault alike, again become relevant, especially the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz, which depends on a language model rather than a natural science model of understanding and that has made its way also into historical studies. Language is the "house of being," in Heidegger's famous aphorism, and the history of ideas, too, has taken up residence here.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gadamer, H.-G. "Die Begriffsgeschichte und die Sprache der Philosophie," Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Forschung des Landes Nordheim-Westfalen 170 (1971).
Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language. Translated by Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982.
Jay, Martin. "Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn?" In Modern Euopean Intellectual History: Reppraisals and New Perspectives, edited by Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982.
Koselleck, Reinhard. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985.
Nelson, John S., Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey, eds. The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.
Richter, Melvin. The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976.
Rorty, Richard, ed. The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
Schrift, Alan D. Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Scott, Joan Wallach. "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis." In her Gender and the Politics of History. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Smith, Bonnie G. The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana, 1976.
Donald R. Kelley
Additional topics
Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Linear expansivity to Macrocosm and microcosmLinguistic Turn - Literary Aspects, Textualism, Intellectual History, Bibliography