De Mauro e Kant: una prospettiva metacritica

The need for unity of linguistics, philosophy and historiography characterizes the work of Tullio De Mauro. From this point of view, his Introduction to Semantics (1965) remains an exemplary text. Aim of these paper is to show the specificity of his position in the context of the 1960s linguistic historiography on the eighteenth century, dwelling in particular on the paragraph devoted to ‘Kant’s silence’. Here De Mauro showed that the shift from a private to a public conception of meaning, generally dated in the first decades of the twentieth century, finds its premises in the thought of Locke and Leibniz and then comes to maturity in the three metacritical thinkers, Hamann, Herder and Humboldt. De Mauro thus stands in continuity with the reflection of Cassirer, Apel and especially Pagliaro, whose idea of language as “technique” he applied to a rethinking of Kantian schematism to the point of forcing the translation of the wellknown Kantian passage.