More recently, however, philosophers of various stripes have taken different and less hostile approaches to literature. Since the work of the British Empiricists and Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth century, Western philosophy has been preoccupied with a fundamental question of epistemology: the question of the relationship between ideas in the human mind and the world existing outside the mind, if in fact such a world exists. In more recent years, these epistemological issues have turned instead to an extended discussion of words and meaning: can language in fact bridge the barrier between minds? This cluster of issues concerning the meaning of language and of "writings" sometimes goes by the name of "the linguistic turn".