Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century By Andrew Ki ...

philosophy—one that privileges the voice over writing as a conduit for truth and ideality—the passage in question mentions neither a human voice nor even dialogue between two embodied speakers.¹³ Rather, for both Plato and Aristotle, ideas take prominence over voice and exist as visual images that can be perceived optically in the mind, not comprehended aurally. As Jowett's translation reveals, logos is graven, that is, written in the soul. In this regard, ideas, even verbally rendered to oneself in thought, share more in common with writing than vocalized speech. How we might hear meaning in the sounds of individual voices and what those meanings may be still beg consideration.

Mediation, Language, and Thought

Such a hearing came to transpire late in the nineteenth century and prompted the linguistic turn in Western philosophy early in the twentieth. According to critical consensus, that turn was characterized by renewed interest in how language works and to what degree language serves as both a medium of thought and communication. Auguste Comte, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, labeled and laid out the positivist program of scientific inquiry with his dictum that no philosophy or science can address or describe that which was not purely material and therefore quantifiable by human sensory perception. Comte advocated the scientific method as a means for testing material phenomena repeatedly in order to overcome the obstacles posed by subjectivity and to arrive at a consensus as to what really exists. At the end of the nineteenth century, and relying on positivist principles, Gottlob Frege attempted to strip from the practice of logic any reliance on intuition. Instead, he called for an application of language that was strictly analytical if not surgical in its precision. The early twentieth-century movements of analytic philosophy and logical positivism grew out of Comte's and Frege's projects, and these emphasized a logical clarity of linguistic argument that is detached from any inherent or self-evident truth claim. They also disavowed the ideality implicit in any ethics, aesthetics, or metaphysics. These movements valued the adherence to rigorous, logical language in