Investigating Kant’s Sources
from Part II - Historical and Philosophical Implications
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 September 2025
Descartes and Kant strike us as the necessary poles of a historical and philosophical process that has constantly put the deaf at the center of theories of language. While Descartes grants the deaf intellectual abilities that match other men’s, Kant pronounces in 1798 a radical verdict, asserting that the deaf from birth are bound to remain deprived of any rational capacity. Why does Kant pronounce such a verdict, at the very time when l’Abbé de l’Epée trains with success the deaf and dumb to talk in Paris, when Samuel Heinicke also succeeds through others paths in Leipzig? I shall argue that this radical shift paradoxically stems from a philosophical breakthrough within the philosophy of language, that is, the unprecedented claim that language is decisively involved in the exercise of crucial mental capacities. Because language was deemed by Cartesians to have secondary and accessory functions, its correlation with the exercise of mental capacities had to be reclaimed by anchoring the conditions of all intellectual performances in the material properties of the phonic medium. This principle provides us with a tool to rationally explain Kant’s claims in the Anthropology.
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