Philology and Philosophical Grammar

Abstract

In order to begin the process of situating Hazlitt’s linguistic work in the context of eighteenth-century philology, his response(s) to the philosophical grammar movement will be considered, with particular emphasis falling upon his complex reaction to Horne Tooke. As noted earlier, even though Hazlitt’s assessment of Horne Tooke’s theorising has sometimes been evaluated in the past, the critical tradition has usually focused primarily (and often exclusively) upon the former’s rejection of the latter’s empiricism, and Park, Bromwich, Natarajan and others have all attempted to elucidate Hazlitt’s distinctive brand of philosophical idealism. This requires an understanding of the way in which his philosophical preoccupations developed in direct response to dominant trends in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought, and, accordingly, his writings have been juxtaposed with those of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, George Berkeley, Jeremy Bentham, to name just a few. However, since Hazlitt’s interest in the interconnections between philology and philosophy was both acute and abiding, his linguistic work is rather more intricate than is generally supposed. For instance, rather than merely revealing the nature of his idealism, it also manifests his concern for the methodology of grammatical analysis — and, although these issues are closely related, they are certainly not identical.