A philosopher has no more difficulty with language than other people, he just sees it more clearly.

For example, as soon as a thing has its name, it changes so that the name no longer fits: what was just called "politics" is now called "war" and by the day after tomorrow will be called something else again, whoever was just "banker" is called now “minister”, and when Friedrich Merz interjects that something like this is called “oligarch” and only found in Russia, then who asks what Merz actually did at Blackrock and why he is constantly co-governing without a ministerial job.

Dietmar Dath

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The name problem is made more difficult by the fact that there is no such thing as "the language" anyway, only different languages ​​between which translation does not fix names or other words in an immovable manner.

A German word can have several English equivalents and vice versa;

this is an indeterminacy (in this case “indeterminacy” rather than “uncertainty”) that led one of the great thinkers of the last century, Willard Van Orman Quine, in a roundabout way even from believing in the previously well-loved distinction in philosophy between analytical and synthetic truths dissuaded.

"Analytical truths" are true by definition ("a murder victim is dead"), "synthetic" by circumstances that might be otherwise ("Person X is a murder victim, but would not be if the murder had been prevented).

Because definitions are awkward, and because circumstances cannot be described without definition, Quine taught everyone, especially one of his brightest students, Norwegian-born Dagfinn Føllesdal, to be careful in clarifying our terms so that we not only tell the truth, but also talk about things in a stable frame of thought as they either have to be or are not, but could be.

This area, if strictly ordered, is called "modal logic";

In it, Føllesdal laid fruitful new avenues of the search for truth in 1961 with his dissertation “Referential Opacity and Modal Logic”.

Anyone who knows how to work on the possible in the opaque secures mankind the chance to dream of better worlds, also with sentences like: “If all those involved read the sections on 'Science and Ethics' written by Føllesdal in the volume 'Rational Argumentation' by Had read and understood in 1986, there would probably have been less stupid discussion during the pandemic crisis.” In addition to philosophers, Føllesdal taught the cinema artist Terrence Malick to ponder, who today likes to extend the indefiniteness between languages ​​to the relationship between word and image,

Føllesdal rightly demolished the wall between the two tribalistically defined claims “Anglo-American analytical philosophy” and “Continental Europe's heritage”;

many analytical minds owe him their knowledge of Husserl's phenomenology.

The professional community even thanked him explicitly with friendly name jokes, i.e. experimental meaning research, as the philosophy of language is allowed to cultivate, while it is forbidden for the serious press - a "Dagfinn", one reads in a philosophical dictionary edited by Daniel Dennett, is next to one "Føllesdal" one of the two creatures that can come out of crossing a dolphin with a shark.

Today the wonder animal is ninety years old.