Abstract

This article tries to point out that in the early modern period, including the Renaissance, philosophy increasingly developed a certain kind of thinking and arguing that needed to be sustained by »icons«, »pictures« or »signs«. Following a suggestion made by Stephen Clucas in inviting a group of scholars to discuss the topos of »silent languages« at Birbeck College , this paper discusses 1. a general possible meaning of »silent language«, divided into three modes of symbolic and geometric representation, and introducing 2. three »stages« in the historical development of philosophical systems representing these three modes: Plotinus, Cusanus, the philosophy of the 16th and 17th century