3 MODERN PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

The history of modern philosophy roughly covers seventeenth-and eighteenthcentury European philosophy, a prolific period spanning from Descartes to Kant. It is in this period that the philosophy of language first becomes a viable subdiscipline, as the greatest philosophers of the time turned to the study of language in a manner very different from their forebears of previous centuries. In the modern period, human natural language became a distinct object of systematic philosophical study expressed in substantial and self-contained texts. The semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic structures of natural language come to be seen as domains worthy of the kind of sustained study that before had been devoted to logic or metaphysics. Moreover, philosophers of this era turned to language in order to solve problems in other areas of philosophy. The study of language was not just a side interest or a source of evidence for already established philosophical principles but was seen as necessary for solving philosophical problems. Finally, central themes and strategies that define the philosophy of language in later centuries, including contemporary analytic philosophy of language, emerge during this period.