Libby asked:

Are philosophical questions actually questions of language?

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I think that it would be a mistake to believe that philosophical questions are anything but philosophical
questions since philosophers should not assume there is but one way to approach them. But, still, it is
true that close attention to what the questions mean is extremely important to trying to answer them.
It would be nearer the truth to say that philosophical questions are conceptual questions, and that
concepts are expressed by language.

It would be useful to cite an example: Immanuel Kant is not someone who is usually thought of as a
"linguistic philosopher". Yet, it was Kant who famously said that existence is not a predicate, which is,
after all, a linguistic point. What he meant is that although when we say that something exists (like
tigers) or deny that something exists (like unicorns), we are not ascribing to them or denying of them
some property that all existing things have, and non-existing things lack. This, despite the fact that the
sentence "tigers exist" looks as if we are predicating a property of tigers, and the sentence "unicorns
do not exist" looks as if we are refusing to predicate a property to unicorns. And, in fact, as Bertrand
Russell, expanding on this point of Kant's argued, when we say that tigers exist, we are not actually
referring to tigers at all (again, despite appearances to the contrary) but we are referring to a
description of a certain kind and saying that at least one thing answers to that description. (The
description is "large striped ferocious feline") And, when we deny that unicorns exist, we are not
talking about unicorns (for how could we since there are no unicorns to talk about) but, once again,
we are talking about a particular description ("Large white equine winged animal with magical powers
and a horn on its head") and saying of that description, that nothing answers to it.

The central point — that when we ostensibly ascribe existence to something, or deny existence to
something, we are not really talking about something at all, but we are saying something about a
description, and saying of that description that something answers to it, or, alternatively that nothing
answers to it — may, I suppose, be called linguistic, since it is about descriptions and they are items
of language if anything. Nevertheless, we could have said the same thing, perhaps more obscurely, in
the language of concepts instead of descriptions. Calling this an exercise "a paradigm of philosophy"
as one philosopher called it is, it seems to me, a not particularly important thing to say. It is Kant's
insight (which by the way, I must mention was had much earlier by a contemporary of Descartes
Pierre Gassendi) and its later expansion and refinement by Russell, about existence that is the
important thing. Whether you choose to call the question, "What is existence?" transformed into the
question, "What are we asserting when we assert of something that it exists?" seems to me a matter
of taste.

And, of course, I have provided only one example. It would be rash to say that every philosophical
problem would yield to the kind of approach just described. I think that in philosophy, it is a matter of,
we try and we see what turns out successful. It would be a mistake, I think to believe that there is one
formula, and that answering philosophical questions is formulaic.

Kenneth Stern