Chapter Seventy Five: Inner Space

It was the cold wind of the season of Spring blowing towards Manhattan in New York City, and classes resume as usual at Columbia University. In one particular classroom at the School of General Studies, Professor Mark Silverhood was discussing Analytic Philosophy to his Bachelor of Arts students.

"In the methods within analytic philosophy, the philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world," the good Professor began his lecture. It was an early morning class, and some of the students are reeking with the aroma of roasted coffee, all in full attention to the topic of discussion. In this part of the university, philosophy classes have a notorious reputation of being outrageously difficult.

The professor continued his prologue to the philosophy lecture, "Investigations in this method of inquiry may include determination of the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, the constitution and structure of sentences, and psychological concepts including learning and the process of thought."

The students are now busy typing in their Macbooks.

"Particularly, Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell were pivotal features in analytic philosophy's 'linguistic turn' in contemporary view, but the crucial examination of language dates back to as far as antiquity."

The professor gazed at his students for a moment for dramatic effect, and then continued.

"In Western thought, analysis of language dates back to 5th century BC with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Both in India and in Greece, linguistic speculation predates the emergence of grammatical traditions of systematic structure of language, which emerged around the same era in India, and around the 3rd century BC in Greece."

"And in the dialogue Cratylus, Plato considered the question of whether names of things were determined by convention or by nature. He criticized conventionalism because it led to the bizarre consequence that anything can be conventionally denominated by any name. Hence, it cannot account for the correct or incorrect application of a name. Plato claimed that there was a 'natural correctness' to names. To do this, he pointed out that compound words and phrases have a range of correctness. He also argued that primitive names had a natural correctness, because each phoneme represented basic ideas or sentiments." 

"Are you still following the content so far?" Professor Silverhood asked.

Everybody in the class nodded. The professor acknowledged the non-verbal response and continued his lecture.

"Meanwhile, Aristotle concerned himself with the critical issues of logic, categories, and the creation of meaning. He separated all things into categories of species and genus. Aristotle thought that the meaning of a predicate was established through an abstraction of the similarities between various individual things. This theory later came to be called nominalism in philosophical methods."

The professor made another dramatic pause, and then went back to writing on the chalkboard.

"Most authors of literature have considered the ideas from these analytical methods in classical wisdom to be concerning the exploration of the inner space of the individual, as opposed to the application of thoughts outside the human body and into the relevance of his environment; later the same thinking was applied to the elucidation of astronomy and then further on to the galaxies of outer space."

The professor has written most of the associated diagram of his lecture on the chalkboard for visual aid with crystal clear clarity. The students are hurriedly typing their notes.

"It was the Stoic philosophers who have ultimately made important contributions to the analysis of grammar, distinguishing five parts of speech: nouns, verbs, appellatives (either proper names or epithets), conjunctions, and articles. They also developed a sophisticated doctrine of the lektón associated with each sign of a language, but distinct from both the sign itself, and the thing to which it refers."

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