Volume 29, Number 10 · June 10, 1982
Is Locke the Key?
By Ian Hacking
From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History
by Hans Aarsleff
University of Minnesota Press, 422 pp., $12.95 (paper)
'Philology: the generally accepted comprehensive name for the study of the word (Greek, logos), or languages; it designates that branch of knowledge which deals with human speech, and with all that speech discloses as to the nature and history of man.' Here there is the strong presumption that speech itself—not what we say, but how we speak—will teach us about our nature or even our past. I quote the words with which the first great American scholar of language, William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894), began an immense article on philology for the Encyclopedia Brittanica. The article was carried until the 1926 edition, but then philology itself faded away. The Encyclopedia would soon be writing, 'Philology: a term now rarely used but once applied to the study of language and literature…. See Linguistics.' It is not just a word, 'philology,' that has been dismissed, but a whole way of thinking.
Review, 2912 words
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