Call for papers - Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio www.rifl.unical.it

Vol. 20, N. 1/2026, Language, Nature, and Culture in Wittgenstein
Edited by Begoña Ramón Cámara

Submission deadline: November 30th, 2025
Publication: June 2026

Wittgenstein has been one of the twentieth century thinkers who has made one of the most interesting contributions, often implicit or latent in his writings, to the topic of the relationship between language, nature, and culture.

Relating language and culture means rethinking, on the basis of that relationship, both language and culture. For example, language ceases to be considered an abstract entity and culture takes on an anthropological connotation in a broad sense. This explains the sense in which Wittgenstein can state in the Brown Book that to imagine a language means to imagine a culture. This connection is taken up and reiterated in the Philosophical Investigations (§19), in which, however, he uses for ‘culture’ not the German ‘Kultur’, but the expression ‘form of life’ (Lebensform). In this passage the Spenglerian connotation of the word ‘Kultur’ (which Wittgenstein had used in an important text of 1929), disappears. In turn, the expression ‘form of life’ serves to underline both the physical-biological and animal aspect of our life and its historical-cultural and conventional aspect, as well as its facticity.