 One of the most elaborate proposals for a universal “philosophical” language was made by bishop John Wilkins (Maat 2004): “An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language” (1668). Wilkins’ project consisted of an elaborate system of symbols that supposedly were associated with unambiguous concepts in reality. Proposals such as these made philosophers sensitive to the deep connections between language and thought. The empiricist methodology made it possible to conceive the development of language as a system of conventional signs in terms of associations between ideas in the human mind. The issue that currently is known as the symbol grounding problem (how do arbitrary signs acquire their inter-subjective meaning) was one of the most heavily debated questions in the eighteenth century in the context of the problem of the origin of languages. Diverse thinkers as Vico, Condillac, Rousseau, Diderot, Herder and Haman made contributions. The central question was whether language was given a priori (by God) or whether it was constructed and hence an invention of man himself. Typical was the contest issued by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1769: