Language

'I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.'The most quotable writer of our time, Terry Pratchett's unique brand of wit made him both a bestseller and an enduring,...

Naming and Necessity has had a great and increasing influence. It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural and metaphysical necessity and to the connections between these and theories of naming, and of identity. This seminal...

'what can be said at all can be said clearly; and of what one cannot talk, about that one must be silent' Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in German in 1921 and in English translation in 1922, is one of the most...

'May be the most detailed, painstaking anatomy of desire that we are ever likely to see or need again... An ecstatic celebration of love and language' Washington PostThe language we use when we are in love is not a language we speak. It is a language...

Are there such things as merely possible people, who would have lived if our ancestors had acted differently? Are there future people, who have not yet been conceived? Questions like those raise deep issues about both the nature of being and its logical...

If you can't prove something, it is literally senseless - so argues Ayer in this irreverent and electrifying book. Statements are either true by definition (as in maths), or can be verified by direct experience. Ayer rejected metaphysical claims about...

Is a whole something more than the sum of its parts? Are there things composed of the same parts? If you divide an object into parts, and divide those parts into smaller parts, will this process ever come to an end? Can something lose parts or gain new...

This collection of classic and contemporary essays in philosophy of language offers a concise introduction to the field for students in graduate and upper-division undergraduate courses. It contains some of the most important basic sources in philosophy...

'Dazzling... Pinker's big idea is that language is an instinct...as innate to us as flying is to geese... Words can hardly do justice to the superlative range and liveliness of Pinker's investigations'- Independent'A marvellously readable book.....

First ever critical study of Tolkien's little-known essay, which reveals how language invention shaped the creation of Middle-earth and beyond, to George R R Martin's Game of Thrones. J.R.R. Tolkien's linguistic...

What does 'if' mean? It is one of the most commonly used words in the English language, in itself a sign to the importance of conditional thinking to human cognitive life. We make conditional statements, ask conditional questions, and issue...

What kind of knowledge could be obtainable just by thinking? Debating the A Priori presents a series of exchanges between two leading philosophers on how to answer this question. In this extended debate, Boghossian and Williamson contribute alternating...

'Electrifying ... A user manual for our polarized world' Adam Grant, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Think Again 'Important, compelling and wise' Johann Hari, Sunday Times-bestselling author of Stolen Focus How do you win...

One of the greatest philosophical works of all time, in a new translation for the twenty-first century'We could capture the whole sense of the book as follows: what can be said at all can be said clearly; and whatever cannot be said must be left to...

A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 'I can't stop talking about this book' Jamie Klingler, co-founder #ReclaimTheseStreets 'What a gem. ... Makes you look at the world, and yourself, afresh.' Minna Salami, author of Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist...

'Marvellously clear... playfully persuasive' Richard Dawkins'Full of Fascinating details. A delight to read.' Tim Harford'Highly original and convincing ... a delight to read!' - Daniel EverettWhat is language?Why do we have it?Why does that...

Someone fails to shake your outstretched hand, puts you down in front of others, or makes a joke in poor taste. Should we take offence? Wouldn't it be better if we didn't? In the face of popular criticism of people taking offence too easily, and the...

LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2017How do we discuss serious ideas in the age of 24-hour news? What was rhetoric in the past and what should it be now? And what does Islamic State have in common with Donald Trump?We've never had more information or more...

'A definitive work...explains clearly and succinctly concepts and theories at the heart of European and American philosophy.' - Brenda AlmondWhat do philosophers mean by 'absolute' and 'akrasia'? What are 'Polish notation' and 'prime matter'? What...

'Telling and compelling' Susie Dent, author of Word Perfect 'Rob Drummond has achieved something very special in this book' David Crystal, author of How Language Works 'Intriguing and engaging' Gyles Brandreth, author of Word Play Why do we have...

Humans naturally acquire languages that connect meanings with pronunciations. Paul M. Pietroski presents an account of these distinctive languages as generative procedures that respect substantive constraints. Children acquire meaningful lexical items...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781681376639Author Peter BrooksFormat PaperbackPage Count 176Imprint The New York Review of Books, IncPublisher The New York Review of Books, Inc

In this book Saul Kripke brings his powerful philosophical intelligence to bear on Wittgenstein's analysis of the notion of following a rule.About the AuthorBorn in Bay Shore, New York, the son of a rabbi (Myer Samuel) and a writer (Dorothy Karp), Saul...

Consider Miles Davis, horn held high, sculpting a powerful musical statement full of tonal patterns, inside jokes, and thrilling climactic phrases all on the fly. Or think of a comedy troupe riffing on a couple of cues from the audience until the whole...

In this fascinating survey of everything from how sounds become speech to how names work, David Crystal answers every question you might ever have had about the nuts and bolts of language in his usual highly illuminating way. Along the way we find out...

The book is a first detailed discussion of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour, a compilation of writings on the subject from the last fifteen months of his life. The origin and significance of the remarks are explained along with a remark-by-remark...

Linguistics falls in the gap between arts and science, on the edges of which the most fascinating discoveries and the most important problems are found. Rather than following the conventional organization of many contemporary introductions to the...

Jacques Derrida's revolutionary approach to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, linguistics, and indeed the entire European tradition of philosophy-called deconstruction-changed the face of criticism. It provoked a questioning of philosophy,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262046718Author Noam ChomskyFormat HardbackPage Count 96Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press Ltd

John Locke was one of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment, whose assertion that reason is the key to knowledge changed the face of philosophy. These writings on thought, ideas, perception, truth and language are some of the most influential in the...

Marjorie Perloff, among our foremost critics of twentieth-century poetry, argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein provided writers with a radical new aesthetic, a key to recognizing the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language. Taking seriously...

AFRO-CARIBBEAN. COLOURED. ETHNIC MINORITY. IMMIGRANT. BAME. URBAN. WOKE. FAM. BLACK.These are just some of the terms being wrestled with in Black, Listed, an exploration of twenty-first century Black identity told through a list of insults, insights and...

Analogy is the core of all thinking. This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been grappling with the mysteries of...

A groundbreaking examination of Michel Foucault's history of truth. Many blame Michel Foucault for our post-truth and conspiracy-laden society. In this provocative work, Daniele Lorenzini argues that such criticism fundamentally misunderstands the...

A provocative case for the inherently political nature of languageIn The Politics of Language, David Beaver and Jason Stanley present a radical new approach to the theory of meaning, offering an account of communication in which political and social...

Speaking Being: Werner Erhard, Martin Heidegger, and a New Possibility of Being Human is an unprecedented study of the ideas and methods developed by the thinker Werner Erhard. In this book, those ideas and methods are revealed by presenting in full an...

Why do we love to swear so much? Why do we get so offended when others do it? With wit and insight, philosopher Rebecca Roache seeks answers to these and other puzzling questions about bad language. When someone swears at you, it can sting. Likewise,...

In seminal works ranging from Sources of the Self to A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has shown how we create possible ways of being, both as individuals and as a society. In his new book setting forth decades of thought, he demonstrates that language is at...

Forty years in the making, this long-awaited reinterpretation of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit is a landmark contribution to philosophy by one of the world's best-known and most influential philosophers.In this much-anticipated work, Robert Brandom...

From Sam Winston, the co-creator of the Bologna Ragazzi award-winning A Child of Books, comes a thought-provoking celebration of the power of stories and written languages, and the imperative to preserve them.Once there were many stories in the world...