Language

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. ...

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 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...

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...

Despite the considerable attention the topic of luck has received in ethics and epistemology, very little has been published in the philosophical literature overtly on linguistic luck. The essays collected here provide the first sustained examination of...

Reading Gramsci is a collection of essays by Francisco Fernndez Buey with a unifying theme: the enduring relevance of Gramsci's political, philosophical and personal reflections for those who wish to understand and transform 'the vast and terrible world'...

The Middle Included is a systematic exploration of the meanings of logos throughout Aristotle's work. It claims that the basic meaning is "gathering," in the sense of a relation that holds its terms together without isolating them or collapsing one to...

This book, originally published in 1963 provides a sample of the criticisms of philosophers on the course of linguistic philosophy. A chronological ordr is followed, with work ranging from that of traditionalist thinkers to second thoughts about...

This book investigates context-sensitivity in natural language by examining the meaning and use of a target class of theoretically recalcitrant expressions. These expressions-including epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague...

How is it that words come to stand for the things they stand for? Is the thing that a word stands for - its reference - fully identified or described by conventions known to the users of the word? Or is there a more roundabout relation between the...

The problem of necessity remains one of the central issues in modern philosophy. The authors of this volume, originally published in 1985, developed a new approach to the problem, which focusses on the logical grammar of necessary propositions. This...