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Introduction: facts, interpretation, and an uneasy confidence In a recent televised exchange, a journalist invoked a familiar Leninist gesture: political claims, he suggested, must ultimately submit to facts; analysis begins and ends with what can be verified in practice. The appeal carried a certain force. It suggested clarity in a landscape often saturated with interpretation, narrative, and suspicion. Yet something in that gesture feels historically displaced. Not because facts have disappeared, nor because material reality has become secondary, but because the philosophical confidence that once accompanied such appeals no longer appears self-evident. The issue is not whether Lenin was “right” or “wrong.” It is that the conditions under which his epistemology could appear unproblematic have shifted. What once functioned as a relatively direct theory of knowledge now emerges as one articulation within a broader and more complex history of how truth is produced, stabilized, and ...

Introduction Readers often pass quickly over the epigraph. Positioned before the main body of a work, it can appear ornamental, a gesture of erudition rather than a site of argument. Yet in certain strands of contemporary philosophical writing, the epigraph performs a far more consequential role. It ceases to function as scholarly decoration and instead operates as a theoretical threshold that unsettles the very idea of textual self-origin. What looks like a preliminary citation may already be staging the problem the essay will unfold. Samuel Weber’s “Closure and Exclusion” offers a striking example. The essay opens not with Weber’s own voice but with two others: Wittgenstein, reflecting on rule-following, and Derrida, distinguishing competing interpretations of interpretation. Before a single claim is advanced, the textual space is already shared. The essay begins, one might say, inhabited. Citation as Authority Within conventional academic prose, citation tends to support a p...

Detail from Die Schachspieler by Moritz Retzsch   Introduction Language has long fascinated philosophers and linguists alike. Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein—working in different contexts—both challenged traditional notions of meaning, rejecting the idea that words merely function as names for things. Central to their respective critiques is the metaphor of the chess game, which each theorist employed to reframe how we think about meaning, value, and linguistic identity. As Roy Harris notes, both thinkers “dismiss the representational theory of language in favor of a rule-based model of meaning.”¹ Challenging Nomenclature: The Quest for Linguistic Identity This shared metaphor of chess emerges from a deeper critique both thinkers develop—a dissatisfaction with nomenclaturism—the belief that language operates primarily through a one-to-one correspondence between words and things.² Both thinkers viewed this as a misleading simplification that failed to account fo...

Introduction Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical trajectory represents one of the most profound transformations in modern thought. His early work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , and his later text, Philosophical Investigations , offer contrasting visions of how language functions and how philosophical problems arise. Central to this divergence is the shift from the picture theory of language to the concept of language games . The former views language as a representational system bound by logical form, while the latter understands language as a socially embedded practice shaped by usage. This essay explores this contrast as the primary axis of Wittgenstein’s philosophical evolution. While other significant concepts—such as rule-following, private language, and the role of philosophy—will be briefly considered to deepen the analysis, the focus remains on the opposition between static representation and dynamic practice. Wittgenstein’s move from the logical rigidity of the Tractatus...

Introduction Philosophical writing often appears as the product of deliberate, structured reasoning—a thinker consciously shaping arguments to construct a coherent system. Yet, there are moments when a philosopher’s own work seems to outgrow its creator, developing beyond their control and forcing them to abandon their original intentions. Two striking cases of this phenomenon can be found in Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Nietzsche. Wittgenstein, in the preface to Philosophical Investigations , acknowledges that he initially attempted to present his later work alongside Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , only to realize that the gap between the two was insurmountable. Likewise, Nietzsche began Beyond Good and Evil as a continuation of The Dawn , but as he transcribed the manuscript, he became convinced that it had taken on a radically different tone and depth. In both cases, the authors were led by the momentum of their own evolving thought, eventually forced to recognize that t...

Note : This article is intended as an introduction to “When Thought Escapes the Thinker: Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and the Autonomy of Language” (see link below ). Introduction Language has often been viewed as a tool wielded by a conscious, autonomous subject. However, poststructuralist thought, along with psychoanalysis and even theological traditions, challenges this assumption. The idea that language precedes and structures human thought suggests that individuals do not simply use language; rather, they are spoken by it. As Lacan famously put it, "It is the world of words that creates the world of things"—an assertion that resonates with Derrida’s concept of arche-writing , Barthes’ death of the author , and even the biblical phrase, "In the beginning was the Word." But if language is the true agent, does this imply a form of determinism, or is there still space for creativity and agency? This article explores the tension between linguistic determinis...

  Introduction This article examines the evolution of philosophy's role in relation to the natural sciences, the emergence of the Linguistic Turn , and offers a critique of its focus on symbols (concepts, mathematical formulas, etc.) from a Peircean perspective. The Linguistic Turn fundamentally redefined philosophy, emphasizing the study of language and symbols, and shifting the discipline away from empirical engagement. This approach, while deepening our understanding of conceptual relationships, risks narrowing the discipline’s scope. Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory, which integrates icons (resemblances), indices (causal connections), and symbols (language), offers a richer way to connect thought and reality. His analysis underscores the need for a balanced strategy that values experiential insight alongside cognitive clarity. Historical Background of Philosophy and the Natural Sciences In antiquity, philosophers like Aristotle and Plato regarded philosophy as ...