Metaphor and Continental Philosophy From Kant to Derrida

How is it that metaphor, the description of one thing as something else, has become so important for questions of knowledge and cognition? There are, I suggest, a number of reasons. Firstly, the linguistic turn in the humanities – following the work of Saussure (1983), Frege (1952), Wittgenstein (1922; 1953), and Whorf (1956) – has foregrounded awareness of the role our linguistic categories play in the organization of the world into identifiable chunks. This position can be regarded, to some extent, as an elaboration of Kant’s thesis that concepts within the mind of the subject are responsible for determining the nature of reality. A key question for this view is how objectivity can be confirmed given that the task of organizing the world has been assigned to subjective consciousness. As several commentators have observed, metaphor itself raises this question (Black 1979; Hausman 1989; Ricoeur 1978a). An original, freshly minted trope (the argument runs) is an instance of creative, subjective language yet