Cartesian Linguistics then and today: Notes on the History of Linguistic Innatism

Abstract

The paper intends to re-read today “Cartesian Linguistics” by Noam Chomsky. Moving from the philosophical context and theoretical assumptions that motivated the text’s birth, we first briefly trace the history of its critical reception from the 60ties up to recent times. We then proceed by presenting some central passages of the book, in order to inquire the later development of its aims along Chomsky’s work until nowadays. Finally, the well-known ‘Plato's Problem’ is retrieved, in order to trace a possible common thread between the ancient and the modern theses of innatism.