Espressione, rappresentazione, giudizio: Herder vs Condillac a proposito dell’origine del linguaggio

The question of the origin of language was one of the great philosophical problems of the 18th century. The main protagonists of this debate were Condillac and Herder, whose positions are still at the centre of a broad controversy, both historiographically and theoretically. Focusing on the Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, the paper reconstructs the central points of Herder’s confrontation with Condillac, and in particular Herder’s semantic theory, condensed in the concept of Besonnenheit, the core of a critique of associationist psychology that would find its development in German form psychology at the beginning of the 20th century.