Philosophy and the Language of the People: The Claims of Common Speech from Petrarch to Locke, by Lodi Nauta

Although the history of linguistic thought is a well-established field of research, it still suffers from a relative isolation from the mainstream of historicalphilosophical studies, as though it were more of interest to linguists than to philosophers. This is especially the case when the period under scrutiny is the Renaissance and early modern age, and the subject matter is ordinary language. Debates about language in general and artificial languages in particular tend to attract the interest of philosophers more easily than debates about natural languages or even “the language of the people.” Lodi Nauta’s book is an attempt to overturn this prejudice by documenting the philosophical import of Renaissance and early modern views of common language and showing that the humanist opposition to scholastic jargon played a significant role in the complex transition from the Middle Ages to modernity.