 For Hamann, in contrast to Kant, the question is therefore not so much ‘what is reason?’ as ‘what is language?’, as he writes in a letter. This is the ground of the paralogisms and antinomies that Kant raises in his Critique. Sharing Hume’s empiricism and Berkeley’s suspicion of universals and abstract terms, he concludes: “Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves” (ZH 5, 264:34–265:1). Language then has a fundamental role to play in unmasking the philosopher’s tendency to ‘prosopopoeia’. The relation of language to reason he certainly did not feel had solved, however, as he wrote to a friend: