Abstract

Though the exact dating is contentious, philosophy at some point took a “linguistic turn,” or maybe a few of them. Certainly late in the twentieth century, influenced by literary theory, the discipline began to attend to language with nearly Talmudic care. “Everything is a text,”1 we read, and since, after all, we were reading it, the notion seemed persuasive. Soon enough, of course, critics perceived that those playing about in this approach to language were having entirely too much fun, getting a little too literary for philosophical tastes. Whether ill tempered or simply tempering, insightful or sullen, criticism noted not only that some theorists seemed insufficiently attentive to historical context—a claim ..