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THE SIGNIFIER FOR THE CONCEPT OF PHILOSOPHY IN LATVIAN FROM THE ASPECT OF THE INTERPRETATIVE CODE
Abstract
In the previous Soviet Union the only and official trend of philosophy was Marxism. After Latvia and other Baltic States regained independence philosophers were free to follow a philosophical trend according to their own scientific interests. Latvian philosophers felt the urge to manifest their intention to regain the true object of investigation of philosophy and mark its origin from the Ancient Greek philosophical thought. With the aim to manifest this intention, a number of philosophers, beginning with the 1990’s, decided to employ a term filosofija (spelt with a consonant “s”) instead of filozofija (spelt with a consonant “z”). Since the form filosofija contradicts the existing Latvian language norms for the borrowing words into the Latvian language, a disagreement broke out between the Latvian linguists and philosophers. Philosophers claim that the reason for adopting the form filosofija is that it is a manifestation of their particular interpretation of the subject of such a philosophy that has got free from ideological conjuncture, and, in addition, the word with “s” clearly shows the associations with sophia (Greek ‘wisdom’). In this situation the term denominating philosophy is a signifier representing an object interpretation of which entails modality judgement and depends on the interpreter’s standpoint. For philosophers, the meaning and usage of the term can be explained from the point of view of the interpretative code. For them, it is the content that determines the form of the signifier. For linguists, the term belongs to the social code with its language sub code, and therefore language norms in this case are the decisive and prevailing factor. As a result, the agreement between linguists and a number of philosophers has not yet been reached and in practice the word is spelt both ways in the philosophical texts, as well as in fiction.
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