Naming and Contingency, and Some Implications for Begriffsgeschichte
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Angela Esterhammer
Abstract
The contingency of proper names has implications for the history of concepts (‘Begriffsgeschichte’), especially with regard to the transmission of discourses among cultures and languages. “Pragmatic” theories of language that take account of hearers and social contexts are especially open to the problematics of contingency, but so is the New Theory of Reference proposed by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity (1972/1980). Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler have explored the social, psychological, and political factors affecting the stability of proper names in their responses to Kripke's antidescriptivist account of reference; Michel Foucault addresses similar ideas in his reflections on the name of the author. There is an even more fundamental openness to contingency in Kripke's model than these theorists suggest. The contingency of naming and reference is explored briefly by way of the circulation of the terms “improvvisatore” and “improvisation” in the multicultural context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Adressen der Mitarbeiter
- Introduction. Framing Contingency: History and Heterology
- Framing the Frame: Contingency, Connection and Divestiture in Literary History and Criticism
- Naming and Contingency, and Some Implications for Begriffsgeschichte
- About Artful Production of Contingency
- Zufälligkeitssinn. Adalbert Stifters Umgang mit der Kontingenz
- Subjective Contingency and Autobiographical Writing
- Counter-Memory and Phantasma
- La Panique Historique. History Encountering Contingency
- History as Effects of Power
- Neutralizing Contingency: Ammianus Marcellinus as a Participant in Julian's Persian Campaign, 363 AD
- “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East)
- “Bridge to Antiquity“. Nostalgia, Exile, and Stoicism in the Poetry of Durs Grünbein
- OΔYΣΣEYΣ OYTIΣ: Odysseus Nobody
- Darstellungen von Dora. Thomas Pynchons Gravity's Rainbow im Spannungsfeld von fiktionalen, historiographischen und erinnerungsbasierten Repräsentationen des Konzentrationslagers Mittelbau-Dora
- Die erlebte Rede als temporales Phänomen
- Rezensionen
Articles in the same Issue
- Adressen der Mitarbeiter
- Introduction. Framing Contingency: History and Heterology
- Framing the Frame: Contingency, Connection and Divestiture in Literary History and Criticism
- Naming and Contingency, and Some Implications for Begriffsgeschichte
- About Artful Production of Contingency
- Zufälligkeitssinn. Adalbert Stifters Umgang mit der Kontingenz
- Subjective Contingency and Autobiographical Writing
- Counter-Memory and Phantasma
- La Panique Historique. History Encountering Contingency
- History as Effects of Power
- Neutralizing Contingency: Ammianus Marcellinus as a Participant in Julian's Persian Campaign, 363 AD
- “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East)
- “Bridge to Antiquity“. Nostalgia, Exile, and Stoicism in the Poetry of Durs Grünbein
- OΔYΣΣEYΣ OYTIΣ: Odysseus Nobody
- Darstellungen von Dora. Thomas Pynchons Gravity's Rainbow im Spannungsfeld von fiktionalen, historiographischen und erinnerungsbasierten Repräsentationen des Konzentrationslagers Mittelbau-Dora
- Die erlebte Rede als temporales Phänomen
- Rezensionen
