IEA

Fellowship from October 2010 to June 2011

Research project:

"The enigma of language: an introduction to a transcendental anthropology"

My ambition is to show specifically why language is still the unknown in philosophy and in sciences of language. This approach will be my starting point for thinking language otherwise, assuming that language is beyond the thought exactly where he is an "anthropological a priori to man". This a priori should com out from a presupposition of Kant that command his transcendental philosophy - that is an agreement between thought and experience of the world. By transforming this agreement in "primitive agreement", it means to imagine why it is not divisible. There is not one side thought and on the other language or on one hand speech and on the other hand meaning. The thought or speech could be possible on condition that there is no distinction here. Such a "condition of possibility" doesn’t exist for Kant, but it fits into a transcendental anthropology which sets the conditions without which neither man nor society can exist. But I follow formally Kant when stressing that these conditions are neither causal nor purely logical. 

Biographical elements:

Arild Utaker was born in Bergen in 1945. After studying philosophy and linguistics at Bergen and Paris, he taught at the University of philosophie in Bergen. He was also director of the Franco-Norwegian Cooperation Centre in the humanities and social sciences at theMSH (Paris) and visiting professor at universities in France and the United States. Apart from his books in Norwegian, he published a book about Ferdinand de Saussure, "The philosophy of language; a Saussurian archeology (PUF 2002). From the perspective both historical and philosophical, his current work tries to show how language escape modern thought.