Recovering the European Dimension in the Philosophy of Language

The Italian Analytic Tradition

Abstract

The paper presents the history of Italian scholars and research centres that contributed to the emergence of the analytic philosophy of language in Italy in the second half of the twentieth century. After a brief description of the work completed in the fifties, I describe the formation of a network of people interested in those contents and methods, trace the origins to the influence of different centres of research in the US and Europe and shortly describe the main events, seminars, conferences and meetings linked to different universities and research groups. These early efforts created a background from which students and junior scholars could evolve and develop original research in that
area. The central idea is that the work on the philosophy of language we made in Italy is part of a wider attempt at reconnecting networks of interactions among philosophers in Europe that were alive before the Nazi period.