Johnson, Alexander Bryan (1786–1867)

Johnson was a self-taught philosophic genius who, completely alone, set out in the 1820s to analyse the nature and limits of language. He was the first thinker who consciously and systematically based his whole approach to philosophical problems on a critique of language. According to Johnson, a knowledge of the nature of language is important because it ‘bears the same relation to all speculative learning as a knowledge of the qualities of drugs bears to the practice of medicine or as a knowledge of perspective and colours bears to painting’ (1854).