Quran AND Science

Using and understanding a language is the distinctive characteristic of

man that separates him from other living beings. This forms the

essence of our inner existence. The questions raised by Ludwig

Wittgenstein played a great role in conceiving the importance of language

in the history of philosophy. Wittgenstein asked questions

which at first sight would seem platitudes, just like in the case of

Newton inquiring into the reason of the planets’ not changing their

courses and of the falling of stones thrown in the air back on the

ground. Wittgenstein had his precursors, like Locke and Leibniz, as

well as Frege and Russell. However, it was Wittgenstein who first

brought the issue of “language” into focus in the history of philosophy.

In Tractatus, a work belonging to his first phase, he tried to construct

an ideal definition of language that gave a picture of the world.

According to him, a sentence that said something (a proposition) had

to be “a picture of reality.” Wittgenstein thinks that if we analyze what

is said, we can reduce it to words that are but names of things and the

connection established between the words of a sentence would represent

the connections between things in the world. In this way, the

sentence may draw the picture of the world.

Wittgenstein believed he had solved all the philosophical problems.

Nevertheless, later on as he advanced in years, he began feeling out of

step with Tractatus. In his second period, he began to conceive of

language as a kind of tool. In this period he claimed that language was

a social phenomenon and activity. The commonality between

Wittgenstein’s former view and the latter is that the language skill

occupies the center of his concern and that it is transformed into the

philosophy of language. Wittgenstein is one of the rare philosophers

who managed to gather around him a large number of disciples,

despite his two contradictory periods. Wittgenstein saw, during his

second period, that language had more meaning than he had originally

thought. In our opinion, the merits of a language and the targets

that it conveys exceed his belief, even at this period. I shall dwell

on this point longer in a book devoted to this subject. These studies

are important since they direct our attention to the importance of language,

a special gift of God to mankind.