Language

The theory of value structure concerns the meaning of "better than" and "good," as well as the way in which values serve as a basis for rational decision making. Drawing methodologically from economics and theories of decision making, the aim of serious...

"Hey, that was kind of racist.""I'm not a racist! I have Black friends."This exchange highlights a problem with how people in the United States tend to talk about racially tricky situations. As Racist, Not Racist, Antiracist: Language and the Dynamic...

Have you ever wondered how the principles behind Shannon's groundbreaking Information Theory can be interwoven with the intricate fabric of linguistic communication? This book takes you on a fascinating journey, offering insights into how humans process...

Slurs and Expressivity: Semantics and Beyond, edited by Eleonora Orlando and Andres Saab,focuses on the analysis of the expressive aspects of slur-words, namely, those words prima facie related to the conveyance of contemptuous or derogatory feelings for...

Bounded Meaning investigates the dynamics of interpretation: how and why the interpretation of the building blocks of human language is sensitive, not just to the context in which the expression is used, but also to the expression's linguistic...

Austinian Themes offers a reconstruction of philosophical views on several themes developed by J. L. Austin. Exploring Austin's work in detail through a series of thematically organized chapters, Marina Sbisa draws on both published work as well as...

In Europe, and later in the United States, the revitalization of the philosophy of language emerged from the need to address certain perplexities concerning formal disciplines and to work out certain complexities found within philosophy. In Uruguay,...

With the recent publication of works from Heidegger's Collected Edition, it has become evident that language occupied a central place in his thought "from early on," as he claimed in his later years. Heidegger's Path to Language takes on the timely task...

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Sarah A. Mattice explores contemporary philosophical activity and the way in which one aspect of language-metaphor-gives shape and boundary to the landscape of the discipline. The book examines metaphors of combat, play, and aesthetic experience and...

With the recent publication of works from Heidegger's Collected Edition, it has become evident that language occupied a central place in his thought "from early on," as he claimed in his later years. Heidegger's Path to Language takes on the...

Ernst Cassirer and the Autonomy of Language examines the central arguments in Cassirer's first volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Gregory Moss demonstrates both how Cassirer defends language as an autonomous cultural form and how he borrows the...

Invisible Language: Its Incalcuable Significance for Philosophy reveals that although the use of language is visible or audible, the medium employed boasts neither of these attributes. Garth L. Hallet suggests that from Plato until now, the...

First published in 1990, Philosophers' Poets is a collection of case studies of philosophers' readings of poets and other distinctive writers. There are those, for example, who find in literary examples ways of exploring the concrete significance of...

Interrogating the much-cherished concept of "poetic thinking," this book focuses on what interview and draft materials reveal of how poets actually do think, when in the act of writing. The interviews confirm what findings from cognitive science and...

In No Professor's Lectures Can Save Us, John J. Stuhr utilizes the thought of American philosopher and psychologist William James to develop an original world view that addresses both enduring philosophical problems and contemporary cultural issues. ...

The work of Mark Sainsbury has made a significant and challenging contribution to several central areas of philosophy, especially philosophy of language and logic. He has made significant contributions to puzzles concerning the nature of thought and...

Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee's "Jesus" fictions constitute a trilogy of novels that have appeared over the last decade. They stand out from his earlier work in their difficulty, and in the central role they accord philosophy--in part through...

"Hey, that was kind of racist.""I'm not a racist! I have Black friends."This exchange highlights a problem with how people in the United States tend to talk about racially tricky situations. As Racist, Not Racist, Antiracist: Language and the Dynamic...

In Speaking of Silence in Heidegger, Wanda Torres Gregory critically analyzes Heidegger's thoughts on silence. Arguing that silence about silence is a guiding principle in his sparse and often reticent words, Torres Gregory sets out to decipher their...

In a postfactual world in which claims are often held to be true only to the extent that they confirm pre-existing or partisan beliefs, this book asks crucial questions: how can we identify the many forms of untruthfulness in discourse? How can we know...

The capacity to speak is not only the ability to pronounce words, but the socially-recognized capacity to make one's words count in various ways. We rely on this capacity whenever we tell another person something and expect to be believed, and what we...

The gruesome double-murder upon which the novel Crime and Punishment hinges leads its culprit, Raskolnikov, into emotional trauma and obsessive, destructive self-reflection. But Raskolnikov's famous philosophical musings are just part of the full...

First published in 1988, Modern Anti-Realism and Manufactured Truth examines the forms of anti-realism which have sprouted in analytic philosophy and addresses more directly the grander culture of anti-realism. No attempt is made in these pages to...

The Limits of Language concerns itself with the nature and limits of language at a time when our understanding of the world and of ourselves is intimately related to what we understand of language.About the AuthorStephen David Ross is Professor of...

In What We Say, Who We Are: Leopold Senghor, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Philosophy of Language, Parker English explores the commonality between Leopold Senghor's concept of "negritude" and Zora Neale Hurston's view of "Negro expression." For English,...

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness-features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in...

Between Logic and the World presents a theory of generic sentences and the kind-directed modes of thought they express. The theory closely integrates compositional semantics with metaphysics to solve the problem that generics pose: what do generics mean?...

Peter Baumann develops and defends a distinctive version of epistemic contextualism, the view that the truth conditions or the meaning of knowledge attributions of the form "S knows that p" can vary with the context of the attributor. The first part of...

The emergence of the alphabet in ancient Greece, usually heralded as the first step in the inexorable march toward reason and progress, in fact signaled the introduction of a chance technology that hijacked the future, with devastating consequences for...

Interrogating the much-cherished concept of "poetic thinking," this book focusses on what interview and draft materials reveal of how poets think while in the act of writing. With findings from the cognitive tradition, this book uses performance theory...

Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji is variously read as a work of feminist protest, the world's first psychological novel and even as a post-modern masterpiece. Commonly seen as Japan's greatest literary work, its literary, cultural, and historical...

With extraordinary concision and clarity, A. J. Ayer gives an account of the major incidents of Bertrand Russell's life and an exposition of the whole range of his philosophy. "Ayer considers Russell to be, except possibly for Wittgenstein, the most...

Originally published in 1990, this book centres on a certain way of surveying a variety of theories of language, and on outlining a new proposal of meaning within the framework set by the survey. One of the key features of both survey and proposal is the...

One of the most important problems of modern philosophy concerns the place of the mind -- and, in particular, of consciousness, meaning, and intentionality -- in a physical universe. Brian Loar was a major contributor to the discussion of this problem...

Linguistic pragmatism claims that what we literally say goes characteristically beyond what the linguistic properties themselves mandate. In this book, John Collins provides a novel defence of this doctrine, arguing that linguistic meaning alone fails to...

Semantics aims to describe the significance (or meaning) of linguistic expressions in a systematic way. Metasemantics, or foundational semantics, asks how expressions gain their significance in the first place - what makes it the case that expressions...

Too often today it seems we find ourselves communicating from radically different perspectives on the world and we often despair of communication even being possible. Peter Ludlow argues that perspectival content, or what some call indexical content, is...

Philosophy of language has been at the center of philosophical research at least since the start of the 20th century. Since that 'linguistic turn' much of the most important work in philosophy has related to language. But until now there has been no...

This book, originally published in 1989 discusses an issue central to all philosophical argument - the relation between persuasion and truth. The techniques of persuasion are indirect and not always fully transparent. Whether philosophers and...