The task of the philosophy of language within the tradition of continental European philosophy has been to overcome the idea of language as an instrument or as a means at the disposal of human beings. Although it has proved possible retrospectively to see Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) as a resource for this task, Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) both contributed more. Hamman was the first to give centrality to language and Humboldt, with his formulation that language is an energeia not an ergon, an activity not a work, opened the door to a more dynamic approach to it. However, it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that these insights were fully explored and decisively surpassed.

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger's attempt to go beyond the instrumentalist and expression theories of language is most...