Call for papers

Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio

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.

The tension between nature and culture is a thread running through the philosophy of the so-called ‘second Wittgenstein’, as shown, in particular, in several passages of On Certainty and in the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. But it had already emerged in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, where it can be read that ‘everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it’ (4.002). This means that the relation of the considerations on language, nature, and culture to the philosophical method and to the task of conceptual clarification that is pursued with it, poses an important question, namely, the question of why and in what sense this emphasis on the fact that imagining a language means imagining a culture (a form of life) is related to Wittgenstein’s philosophy as a conceptual investigation.

Call for Papers