Philosophy of language Books

Book SynopsisIntroducing a new and ambitious position in the field, Kit Fine's Semantic Relationism is a major contribution to the philosophy of language.Trade Review"Combines careful, detailed argumentation with inspiration and synoptic vision for the bigger picture. ... One can reasonably expect Fine's book to be a spur for thinking about these issues for many years to come." (Mind, October 2009)Table of ContentsPreface. Introduction. 1. Coordination among Variables. A. The Desiderata. B. The Problem. C. The Contextualist Response. D. The Dismissive Response. E. The Instantial Approach. F. The Algebraic Approach. G. Relational Semantics for First-order Logic. 2. Coordination within Language. A. Frege’s Puzzle. B. Rejecting Compositionality. C. Semantic Fact. D. Closure. E. Referentialism Reconsidered. F. A Relational Semantics for Names. G. Transparency. 3. Coordination within Thought. A. Intentional Coordination. B. Strict Co-representation. C. The Content of Thought. D. The Cognitive Puzzle. 4. Coordination between Speakers. A. Kripke’s Puzzle. B. Some Related Puzzles. C. A Response. D. A Solution. E. A Deeper Puzzle. F. A Deeper Solution. G. The Role of Variables in Belief Reports. H. Some Semantical Morals. Postscript: Further Work. Index

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Book SynopsisDesigned for readers new to the subject, Reading Philosophy of Language presents key texts in the philosophy of language together with helpful editorial guidance. A concise collection of key texts in the philosophy of language Ideal for readers new to the subject. Features seminal texts by leading figures in the field, such as Austin, Chomsky, Davidson, Dummett and Searle. Presents three texts on each of five key topics: speech and performance; meaning and truth; knowledge of language; meaning and compositionality; and non-literal meaning. A volume introduction from the editors outlines the subject's principal concerns. Introductions to each chapter locate the pieces in context and explain relevant terminology and theories. Interactive commentaries help readers to engage with the texts. Trade Review"To get stuck in to this book is to taste the sort of intense learning experience that you might get if the editors were giving you personal tutorials. Those who teach philosophy of language to University undergraduates will regard Reading Philosophy of Language as a valuable addition to their armoury." Dr Andrew Woodfield, University of Bristol "This is an outstanding text, with a perfect blend of well-selected original works and excellent, interleaved commentary. I will immediately adopt it for my undergraduate Philosophy of Language course." David Shier, Washington State University Table of ContentsSources and Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. Reference and Meaning:. Introduction. Introduction to Locke. John Locke, ‘Of Words’ (extracts from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding). Commentary on Locke. Introduction to Mill. J.S. Mill, ‘On Names’ (extracts from System of Logic). Commentary on Mill. Introduction to Frege. Gottlob Frege ‘On Sense and Reference’ (extract). Commentary on Frege. Conclusion. 2. Speech and Action:. Introduction. Introduction to Austin. J.L. Austin, ‘Performative Utterances’. Commentary on Austin. Introduction to Alston. William P. Alston, ‘Meaning and Use’. Commentary on Alston. Introduction to Searle. John R. Searle, ‘Meaning’ (extracts from Speech Acts). Commentary on Searle. Conclusion. 3. Meaning and Truth:. Introduction. Introduction to Davidson. Donald Davidson, ‘Radical Interpretation’. Commentary on Davidson. Introduction to Soames. Scott Soames, ‘Semantics and Semantic Competence’ (extract). Commentary on Soames. Introduction to Wright. Crispin Wright, ‘Theories of Meaning and Speakers’ Knowledge’ (extract). Commentary on Wright. Conclusion. Appendix: Tarski’s Truth-theoretic Machinery. 4. Knowledge of Language:. Introduction. Introduction to Chomsky. Noam Chomsky, ‘Knowledge of Language as a Focus of Inquiry’ (extracts from Knowledge of Language). Commentary on Chomsky. Introduction to Dummett. Michael Dummett, ‘What do I know when I know a language?’. Commentary on Dummett. Introduction to Campbell. John Campbell, ‘Knowledge and Understanding’. Commentary on Campbell. Conclusion. 5. Meaning and Compositionality:. Introduction. Introduction to Horwich. Paul Horwich, ‘The Composition of Meanings’ (extracts from Meaning). Commentary on Horwich. Introduction to Higginbotham. James Higginbotham, ‘A Perspective on Truth and Meaning’ (extracts). Commentary on Higginbotham. Introduction to Pietroski. Paul Pietroski, ‘The Undeflated Domain of Semantics’. Commentary on Pietroski. Conclusion. 6. Non-literal Meaning:. Introduction. Introduction to Bergmann. Merrie Bergmann, ‘Metaphorical Assertions’. Commentary on Bergmann. Introduction to Davies. Martin Davies, ‘Idiom and Metaphor’. Commentary on Davies. Introduction to Bach. Kent Bach, ‘Speaking Loosely: Sentence Non-Literality’. Commentary on Bach. Conclusion. Further Reading. Index

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Book SynopsisDesigned for readers new to the subject, Reading Philosophy of Language presents key texts in the philosophy of language together with helpful editorial guidance. A concise collection of key texts in the philosophy of language Ideal for readers new to the subject. Features seminal texts by leading figures in the field, such as Austin, Chomsky, Davidson, Dummett and Searle. Presents three texts on each of five key topics: speech and performance; meaning and truth; knowledge of language; meaning and compositionality; and non-literal meaning. A volume introduction from the editors outlines the subject's principal concerns. Introductions to each chapter locate the pieces in context and explain relevant terminology and theories. Interactive commentaries help readers to engage with the texts. Trade Review"To get stuck in to this book is to taste the sort of intense learning experience that you might get if the editors were giving you personal tutorials. Those who teach philosophy of language to University undergraduates will regard Reading Philosophy of Language as a valuable addition to their armoury." Dr Andrew Woodfield, University of Bristol "This is an outstanding text, with a perfect blend of well-selected original works and excellent, interleaved commentary. I will immediately adopt it for my undergraduate Philosophy of Language course." David Shier, Washington State University Table of ContentsSources and Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1. Reference and Meaning 7 2. Speech and Action 43 3. Meaning and Truth 89 4. Knowledge of Language 152 5. Meaning and Compositionality 215 6. Non-literal Meaning 249 Further Reading 306 Index 318

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Book SynopsisKit Fine argues for a fundamentally new approach to the study of representation in language and thought. His key idea is that there may be representational relationships between expressions or elements of thought that are not grounded in the intrinsic representational features of the expressions or elements themselves.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Coordination among Variables A. The Desiderata B. The Problem C. The Contextualist Response D. The Dismissive Response E. The Instantial Approach F. The Algebraic Approach G. Relational Semantics for First-order Logic 2. Coordination within Language A. Frege’s Puzzle B. Rejecting Compositionality C. Semantic Fact D. Closure E. Referentialism Reconsidered F. A Relational Semantics for Names G. Transparency 3. Coordination within Thought A. Intentional Coordination B. Strict Co-representation C. The Content of Thought D. The Cognitive Puzzle 4. Coordination between Speakers A. Kripke’s Puzzle B. Some Related Puzzles C. A Response D. A Solution E. A Deeper Puzzle F. A Deeper Solution G. The Role of Variables in Belief Reports H. Some Semantical Morals Postscript: Further Work Index

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Book SynopsisWhat might behaviorism, that debunked school of psychology, tell us about literature?If inanimate objects such as novels or poems have no mental properties of their own, then why do we talk about them as if they do? Why do we perceive the minds of characters, narrators, and speakers as if they were comparable to our own? In Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind, Joshua Gang offers a radical new approach to these questions, which are among the most challenging philosophical problems faced by literary study today. Recent cognitive criticism has tried to answer these questions by looking for similarities and analogies between literary form and the processes of the brain. In contrast, Gang turns to one of the twentieth century's most infamous psychological doctrines: behaviorism. Beginning in 1913, a range of psychologists and philosophersincluding John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner, and Gilbert Ryleargued that many of the things we talk about as mental phenomena aren't at all intTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Literary Experience and the Concept of Mind1. Behaviorism and the Beginnings of Close Reading2. Inner Sights3. Mental Acts4. The Form of ThoughtCoda. Observations and/or ReflectionsNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisA short but engaging look at how questions shape our thinking. Why do we ask questions? In Questions, Pia Lauritzen explores the philosophy behind questions and probes how they function as both a development tool and a bridge to understanding. She speculates that the question is the essential characteristic that distinguishes human beings from animals and that it is the key to understanding why we think and act as we do. Basic human phenomena like surprise and doubt, ignorance and curiositywhich all articulate a questioning mode of dealing with the worldmay well be the reason why human beings developed language. Yet the diverse ways that different languages and cultures treat questions reflects and reinforces crucial cultural differences. Ultimately, Lauritzen argues, the question is the key to understanding the inner logic that links all major themes in the history of Western philosophy. In Reflections, a series copublished with Denmark's Aarhus University Press, scholars deliver 60Table of Contents1. Calling Questions Into Question?2. The First Question3. The History of the Question4. Questions And Being Human5. The Structure Of The Question6. Questions And Language

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Book SynopsisIn Topoi/Graphein Christian Abrahamsson maps the paradoxical limit of the in-between to revealthat to be human is to know how tolive with the difference between the known and the unknown. Using filmic case studies, including CodeInconnu, Lord of the Flies, and Apocalypse Now,and focusing on key concerns developed in the works of the philosophers Deleuze, Olsson, and Wittgenstein, Abrahamsson starts within the notion of fixed spatiality, in whichhuman thought and action are anchored in the given of identity. He then movesthrough a social world in which spatiotemporal transformations are neitherfixed nor taken for granted. Finally he edges into the pure temporality that liesbeyond the maps of fixed points and social relations. Each chapter is organized into two subjects: topoi, orexcerpts from the films, and graphein, the author's interpretation ofpresented theoriesto mirror the displacements,transpositions, juxtapositions, fluctuations, and transformations between delimited categorieTrade Review"Readers with an interest in spatial theory or cinematic geography should obviously appreciate this work, but so should anyone who wants to understand how a world falls apart and continues to fall apart."—Marcus A. Doel, Social and Cultural Geography“Topoi/Graphein poses the most profound philosophical and conceptual questions concerning the human condition from a compelling geographical perspective. A sustained meditation on our engagement with the world, it journeys over remarkably wide-ranging territory, delivering valuable insights with an uncommon intensity of thought. This is a heavyweight work that wears its profundity lightly.”—David B. Clarke, professor of human geography and head of the Department of Geography at Swansea University“Generations of scholars have identified their respective positions with reference to landmark propositions emanating from singular publications. Topoi/Graphein holds the promise of becoming such a book for a coming generation. It tackles its subject matter with considerable verve and elegant style.”—Ulf Strohmayer, professor of geography at the National University of Ireland, GalwayTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Foreword: Born Again, by Gunnar Olsson Introduction: Angle of Power Part 1. Code inconnu/Crossroads Chapter 1. Encounter/Point Chapter 2. Wall/Stone Chapter 3. Code inconnu/When Above Chapter 4. Limits/Oedipus Chapter 5. Stranger/Terra Firma Part 2. Lord of the Flies/Passages Chapter 6. Desert/Line Chapter 7. Thing/Swerve Chapter 8. Lord of the Flies/Through Chapter 9. Division/Hermes Chapter 10. Fire/Terra Nullius Part 3. Apocalypse Now/The Event Chapter 11. Dream/Plane Chapter 12. River/Cloud Chapter 13. Apocalypse Now/In-Between Chapter 14. Darkness/Janus Chapter 15. Abyss/Horror Vacui Part 4. Geographein Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisWerner Hamacher's witty and elliptical 95 Theses on Philology challenges the humanitiesand particularly academic philologythat assume language to be a given entity rather than an event. In Give the Word eleven scholars take up the challenge presented by Hamacher's theses.Trade Review“This is a stunningly original collection of essays—utterly engrossing and compelling. Probing, erudite, elegant, witty, these essays explore the concept of philology at once literally (literally “literally,” that is, to the letter, down to its smallest granules of articulation) and expansively, inviting us to rethink the fundamental categories of existence—language, translation, tradition, genealogy, history, sociability, love, kinship, in short, just about everything. Hamacher’s magnificent Theses could not find a more vibrant afterlife.”—Rebecca Comay, professor of philosophy and comparative literature at the University of Toronto “Werner Hamacher’s 95 Theses on Philology proposes a new radical understanding of philology distinct from its dusty nineteenth-century conception. The eleven responses to his 95 Theses have provided him with an opportunity to comment extensively and in generous detail on the responses they provoked. Hamacher’s lengthy contribution is not only an extraordinary document of scholarly debate but also a superb piece in which he elaborates on the context of his Theses and on their rich theoretical and philosophical ramifications, thus also providing insight into the workings of his own thought.”—Rodolphe Gasché, Distinguished Professor and Eugenio Donato Chair of Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo, the State University of New YorkTable of Contents95 Theses on Philology / 95 Thesen zur Philologie Werner Hamacher, translated by Catharine Diehl Introduction Gerhard Richter and Ann Smock Part 1. Balances1. Was heißt Lesen?—What Is Called Reading? Gerhard Richter 2. Language-Such-That-It’s-Spoken Michèle Cohen-Halimi, translated by Ann Smock 3. 48: [this space intentionally left blank] Jan Plug 4. Catch a Wave: Sound, Poetry, Philology Sean Gurd Part 2. Times 5. Einmal ist Keinmal: On the 76th of Werner Hamacher’s 95 Theses for Philology Ann Smock 6. Rereading tempus fugit Thomas Schestag 7. Language on Pause: Hamacher’s Seconds of Celan and Daive Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Part 3. Categories 8. The Right Not to Complain: A Philology of Kinship Avital “Irony” Ronell 9. The Category of Philology Peter Fenves 10. The Philía of Philology Susan Bernstein 11. Defining the Indefinite Daniel Heller-Roazen Part 4. Responding to Responses 12. What Remains to Be Said: On Twelve and More Ways of Looking at Philology Werner Hamacher, translated by Kristina Mendicino Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisPhilosophy and rhetoric are both old enemies and old friends. In The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy, Donald Phillip Verene sets out to shift our understanding of the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric from that of separation to one of close association. He outlines how ancient rhetors focused on the impact of language regardless of truth, ancient philosophers utilized language to test truth; and ultimately, this separation of right reasoning from rhetoric has remained intact throughout history. It is time, Verene argues, to reassess this ancient and misunderstood relationship. Verene traces his argument utilizing the writing of ancient and modern authors from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Kant; he also explores the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, as well as the nature of speculative philosophy. Verene''s argument culminates in a unique analysis of the frontispiece as a rhetorical device in the works of Hobbes, Vico, and Rousseau. Verene bridges the stuTrade ReviewVerene presents an extended original essay on one of the oldest of philosophical themes, the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy. With great subtlety and enormous erudition, the author challenges the "Platonic quarrel with the poets and the rhetoricians". * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy Part I: Prolegomena Philosophiae 1. Philosophical Thinking 2. Philosophy and the Muses 3. Philosophy and Eloquence 4. Philosophical Style Part II: Three Rhetorics 5. The Rhetoric of Self-Discourse 6. The Rhetoric of Absolute Thought 7. The Rhetoric of the Philosophical Frontispiece Epilogue

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Book SynopsisThis is the first English translation, by Thomas Allan Smith, of Philosophy of the Name (Filosofiia imeni). Sergii Bulgakov (18711944) wrote the book in response to a theological controversy that erupted in Russia just before the outbreak of World War I. Bulgakov develops a philosophy of language that aims to justify the truthfulness of the statement the Name of God is God himself, a claim provoking debate on the meaning of names, and the Name of God in particular. Philosophy of the Name investigates the nature of words and human language, considers grammar and parts of speech, and concludes with an exposition on the Name of God.Name-glorifying, a spiritual movement connected with the Orthodox practice of the Jesus Prayer, was initially censured by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the controversy raised profound questions that continue to vex ecclesiastical authorities and theologians today. The controvTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. What is a Word? 2. Speech and Word 3. Towards a Philosophy of Grammar 4. Language and Thought 5. The "Proper" Name 6. The Name of God Post Scriptum to the Essay on the Name of God Excursuses

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewSpanning from the biblical account of creation to modern genetics, Blumenberg's book can be understood as an intense effort to refract the history of ideas through the lens of a fundamental metaphor. In detailed individual analyses of relevant historical texts, he explains the metaphor's various assignments of meaning from the intellectual, sociocultural, and biographical contexts in which it is deployed. * Rhetorica *Learning about Blumenberg's metaphorology as well as the stars of intellectual history has been made possible for Anglophones by the extraordinary translation skills of Robert Savage and David Roberts. * Los Angeles Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisBeing serious demands serious kinds of work. In Styles of Seriousness, Steven Connor reflects on the surprisingly various ways in which a sense of the serious is made and maintained, revealing that while seriousness is the most powerful feeling, it is also the most poignantly indeterminate, perhaps because of the impossibility of being completely serious. In colloquy with philosophers such as Aristotle, Nietzsche, James, Sartre, Austin, Agamben and Sloterdijk, and writers like Shakespeare, Byron, Auden and Orwell, Connor considers the linguistic and ritual behaviors associated with different modes of seriousness: importance; intention, or ways of really "meaning things;" sincerity; solemnity; urgency; regret; warning; and ordeal. The central claim of the book is human beings are capable of taking things seriously in a way that nonhuman animals are not, for the unexpected reason that human beings are so much more versatile than most animals at not being completely serious. One always, in fact, has a choice about whether or not to take seriously something that is supposed to be so. As a consequence, seriousness depends on different kinds of formalization or stylized practice. Styles of seriousness matter, Connor shows, because human beings are incapable of simply and spontaneously existing. Being a human means having to take seriously one's style of being. Trade Review"Connor's is a game-changing study, delimiting new terrain at every witty and penetrating turn. There is nothing like this remarkable book, with its lambent and matured critical voice and its confident obliteration of disciplinary boundaries."—Garrett Stewart, author of The Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors"At once stunningly erudite and seriously entertaining, Steven Connor takes impish delight in revealing the way solemnity, zeal, and heavyweight intent weave across history into the fabric of philosophy, literature, and everyday life. With doom-mongering now the self-certified pastime of our current era of competitive piety, Styles of Seriousness is all the more eye-opening and deliciously irreverent."—David James, author of Discrepant Solace"The human species, said Emerson, is the only joker in nature. Steven Connor's essay on 'the holiday virtues' deliciously shows the precarious proximity of solemnity and hilarity. His anatomy of seriousness is both a philosophical meditation on the human estate and a political skirmish against the latest rounds of fatuousness. The book is at once puckish, exacting, and morally grounded."—John Durham Peters, author of The Marvelous Clouds

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Book SynopsisBeing serious demands serious kinds of work. In Styles of Seriousness, Steven Connor reflects on the surprisingly various ways in which a sense of the serious is made and maintained, revealing that while seriousness is the most powerful feeling, it is also the most poignantly indeterminate, perhaps because of the impossibility of being completely serious. In colloquy with philosophers such as Aristotle, Nietzsche, James, Sartre, Austin, Agamben and Sloterdijk, and writers like Shakespeare, Byron, Auden and Orwell, Connor considers the linguistic and ritual behaviors associated with different modes of seriousness: importance; intention, or ways of really "meaning things;" sincerity; solemnity; urgency; regret; warning; and ordeal. The central claim of the book is human beings are capable of taking things seriously in a way that nonhuman animals are not, for the unexpected reason that human beings are so much more versatile than most animals at not being completely serious. One always, in fact, has a choice about whether or not to take seriously something that is supposed to be so. As a consequence, seriousness depends on different kinds of formalization or stylized practice. Styles of seriousness matter, Connor shows, because human beings are incapable of simply and spontaneously existing. Being a human means having to take seriously one's style of being. Trade Review"Connor's is a game-changing study, delimiting new terrain at every witty and penetrating turn. There is nothing like this remarkable book, with its lambent and matured critical voice and its confident obliteration of disciplinary boundaries."—Garrett Stewart, author of The Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors"At once stunningly erudite and seriously entertaining, Steven Connor takes impish delight in revealing the way solemnity, zeal, and heavyweight intent weave across history into the fabric of philosophy, literature, and everyday life. With doom-mongering now the self-certified pastime of our current era of competitive piety, Styles of Seriousness is all the more eye-opening and deliciously irreverent."—David James, author of Discrepant Solace"The human species, said Emerson, is the only joker in nature. Steven Connor's essay on 'the holiday virtues' deliciously shows the precarious proximity of solemnity and hilarity. His anatomy of seriousness is both a philosophical meditation on the human estate and a political skirmish against the latest rounds of fatuousness. The book is at once puckish, exacting, and morally grounded."—John Durham Peters, author of The Marvelous Clouds

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Book SynopsisRoland Barthes (1915-1980) was a central figure in the thought of his time, but he was also something of an outsider. His father died in the First World War, he enjoyed his mother’s unfailing love, he spent long years in the sanatorium, and he was aware of his homosexuality from an early age: all this soon gave him a sense of his own difference. He experienced the great events of contemporary history from a distance. However, his life was caught up in the violent, intense sweep of the twentieth century, a century that he helped to make intelligible. This major new biography of Barthes, based on unpublished material never before explored (archives, journals and notebooks), sheds new light on his intellectual positions, his political commitments and his ideas, beliefs and desires. It details the many themes he discussed, the authors he defended, the myths he castigated, the polemics that made him famous and his acute ear for the languages of his day. It also underscores his remarkable ability to see which way the wind was blowing Ð and he is still a compelling author to read in part because his path-breaking explorations uncovered themes that continue to preoccupy us today. Barthes’s life story gives substance and cohesion to his career, which was guided by desire, perspicacity and an extreme sensitivity to the material from which the world is shaped Ð as well as a powerful refusal to accept any authoritarian discourse. By allowing thought to be based on imagination, he turned thinking into both an art and an adventure. This remarkable biography enables the reader to enter into Barthes’s life and grasp the shape of his existence, and thus understand the kind of writer he became and how he turned literature into life itself.Trade Review"Barthes, like no other modern writer, invented a critical form that was “live” in every sense, where the labor of writing criticism acquired animate breath and pulse as it entered Barthes’ chronicle of aesthetic preparation for a Vita Nova, a new life, a novel, a reading of ideologies, images, voices, cultural myths and above all literary texts. Such a self-writing subject poses a daunting challenge to the biographer. But Tiphaine Samoyault has risen to it, with a magisterial life of Roland Barthes, enriched by new archival material and her own peerless talents as both writer and literary critic." - Emily Apter, New York University "Tiphaine Samoyault’s outstanding biography of Roland Barthes allows us to meet him in person, as it were, as a lively, seductive French intellectual. At the same time, Samoyault offers us a splendid introduction to Barthes’ ground-breaking writings in so many fields, from literary theory to meditations about the meaning of human existence." - Thomas Pavel, The University of Chicago ‘While offering the most detailed and elegantly written interpretation to date of the life and works of its remarkable subject, this book is much more than a traditional intellectual biography. Typhaine Samoyault’s masterful, multilayered and, at times, lyrical narrative captures Roland Barthes the person and writer, essayist and scholar, and depicts him in his time and with his contemporaries, family and friends, colleagues and lovers, to be sure. Her phenomenal study tracks the doing and undoing of a great writer and thinker, a witness of what is still, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, very much our own time and cultural, indeed, political predicament. In so doing, she offers a valuable testimony of a person facing opportunities and challenges whose enduring lesson and bitter sweetness we have all learned to appreciate and savour.’ - Hent de Vries, The Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University‘superb’ The New York Review of Books

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Book SynopsisA primatologist and a humanist together explore the meaning of being a “human animal”Humanness is typically defined by our capacity for language and abstract thinking. Yet decades of research led by the primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has shown that chimpanzees and bonobos can acquire human language through signing and technology. Drawing on this research, Dialogues of the Human Ape brings Savage-Rumbaugh into conversation with the philosopher Laurent Dubreuil to explore the theoretical and practical dimensions of what being a “human animal” means. In their use of dialogue as the primary mode of philosophical and scientific inquiry, the authors transcend the rigidity of scientific and humanist discourses, offering a powerful model for the dissemination of speculative hypotheses and open-ended debates grounded in scientific research.Arguing that being human is an epigenetically driven process rather than a fixed characteristic rooted in genetics or culture, this book suggests that while humanness may not be possible in every species, it can emerge in certain supposedly nonhuman species. Moving beyond irrational critiques of ape consciousness that are motivated by arrogant, anthropocentric views, Dialogues on the Human Ape instead takes seriously the continuities between the ape mind and the human mind, addressing why language matters to consciousness, free will, and the formation of the “human animal” self.Trade Review"These dialogues provide unique insight into ape language research. Stimulating language in apes is too ramified to be controlled intellectually or restricted to a laboratory. It requires spontaneity, taking participants beyond the known. Even communicating the work requires spontaneity, for the intellect does not know what happened. You will be amazed at what these dialogues reveal about humanness beyond humanity."—Pär Segerdahl, Uppsala University"Dialogues on the Human Ape demolishes the simple human/animal dichotomy and the idealization that only humans ‘have’ language, as though language is some kind of all-or-none essence. These compelling conversations between Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Laurent Dubreuil will open minds and challenge assumptions about what it means to be a human ape."—Terrence W. Deacon, University of California, Berkeley"This book appears in an important series on Post-humanities, so academics and researchers in that field would certainly find much value in this volume as well. The book is intellectually and emotionally engaging, well written, and nicely organized."—ASEBL Journal"The book explores the continuities between the ape and human minds, addressing why language matters to consciousness, free will and the formation of the self."—Cornell ChronicleTable of ContentsContentsForewordPrelude1. On Animals and Apes2. On Dialogue and Consciousness3. On the Flavors of Consciousness4. On Language and Apes5. On Free WillAnnex: A Timeline of Ape Language Research

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Book SynopsisA primatologist and a humanist together explore the meaning of being a “human animal”Humanness is typically defined by our capacity for language and abstract thinking. Yet decades of research led by the primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has shown that chimpanzees and bonobos can acquire human language through signing and technology. Drawing on this research, Dialogues of the Human Ape brings Savage-Rumbaugh into conversation with the philosopher Laurent Dubreuil to explore the theoretical and practical dimensions of what being a “human animal” means. In their use of dialogue as the primary mode of philosophical and scientific inquiry, the authors transcend the rigidity of scientific and humanist discourses, offering a powerful model for the dissemination of speculative hypotheses and open-ended debates grounded in scientific research.Arguing that being human is an epigenetically driven process rather than a fixed characteristic rooted in genetics or culture, this book suggests that while humanness may not be possible in every species, it can emerge in certain supposedly nonhuman species. Moving beyond irrational critiques of ape consciousness that are motivated by arrogant, anthropocentric views, Dialogues on the Human Ape instead takes seriously the continuities between the ape mind and the human mind, addressing why language matters to consciousness, free will, and the formation of the “human animal” self.Trade Review"These dialogues provide unique insight into ape language research. Stimulating language in apes is too ramified to be controlled intellectually or restricted to a laboratory. It requires spontaneity, taking participants beyond the known. Even communicating the work requires spontaneity, for the intellect does not know what happened. You will be amazed at what these dialogues reveal about humanness beyond humanity."—Pär Segerdahl, Uppsala University"Dialogues on the Human Ape demolishes the simple human/animal dichotomy and the idealization that only humans ‘have’ language, as though language is some kind of all-or-none essence. These compelling conversations between Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Laurent Dubreuil will open minds and challenge assumptions about what it means to be a human ape."—Terrence W. Deacon, University of California, Berkeley"This book appears in an important series on Post-humanities, so academics and researchers in that field would certainly find much value in this volume as well. The book is intellectually and emotionally engaging, well written, and nicely organized."—ASEBL Journal"The book explores the continuities between the ape and human minds, addressing why language matters to consciousness, free will and the formation of the self."—Cornell ChronicleTable of ContentsContentsForewordPrelude1. On Animals and Apes2. On Dialogue and Consciousness3. On the Flavors of Consciousness4. On Language and Apes5. On Free WillAnnex: A Timeline of Ape Language Research

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Book SynopsisA bold new critique of dialogue as a method of eliminating dissent Is dialogue always the productive political and communicative tool it is widely conceived to be? Resisting Dialogue reassesses our assumptions about dialogue and, in so doing, about what a politically healthy society should look like. Juan Meneses argues that, far from an unalloyed good, dialogue often serves as a subtle tool of domination, perpetuating the underlying inequalities it is intended to address.Meneses investigates how “illusory dialogue” (a particular dialogic encounter designed to secure consensus) is employed as an instrument that forestalls—instead of fostering—articulations of dissent that lead to political change. He does so through close readings of novels from the English-speaking world written in the past hundred years—from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and more. Resisting Dialogue demonstrates how these novels are rhetorical exercises with real political clout capable of restoring the radical potential of dialogue in today’s globalized world. Expanding the boundaries of postpolitical theory, Meneses reveals how these works offer ways to practice disagreement against this regulatory use of dialogue and expose the pitfalls of certain other dialogic interventions in relation to some of the most prominent questions of modern history: cosmopolitanism at the end of empire, the dangers of rewriting the historical record, the affective dimension of neoliberalism, the racial and nationalist underpinnings of the “war on terror,” and the visibility of environmental violence in the Anthropocene. Ultimately, Resisting Dialogue is a complex, provocative critique that, melding political and literary theory, reveals how fiction can help confront the deployment of dialogue to preempt the emergence of dissent and, thus, revitalize the practice of emancipatory politics. Trade Review"Deepening and widening a furrow first plowed by Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, Resisting Dialogue marks a refusal to underwrite ‘postpolitics’ as politics by insisting that unspeakable political ambition take its place, without apology, so that our voyage from a troubled modernist literature to the Anthropocene maps, simultaneously, a continuous trajectory and a jarring, disjunctive continuity."—Grant Farred, Cornell University"Resisting Dialogue draws on literature to develop a fresh vocabulary of political activism and thetic force. Contrarianism, deadlock, impasse, silence, resilience, persistence, the power of unexceptional figures of history to block and oppose the status quo—these immobilizing postures acquire a make-over as acts of agency that contest the eclipse of political agency besetting progressive theories of the Political."—Emily Apter, author of Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic "In all, Resisting Dialogue will be immensely useful for those conducting scholarly work in global studies across the disciplines, especially in the twentieth- and twenty-first century literary studies."—Project Muse "In attuning us to examine with greater sensitivity the political contours of dialogue... Meneses makes a genuinely original,impactful contribution to the study of the novel, as well as to political discourse and theory. "—American Literary History"Meneses changes the terms of a larger cultural debate about dialogue to reframe what is actually happening as the illusory manipulations of postpolitical power... in doing so, he demonstrates a promising correlation between reading imaginative texts and reading the world."—MFS Modern Fiction Studies"Resisting Dialogue is a crucial meditation on our fraught times of ever-deepening social, cultural and political divides, where all attempts at dialogue seem to be failing."—LSE Review of Books

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Book SynopsisA bold new critique of dialogue as a method of eliminating dissent Is dialogue always the productive political and communicative tool it is widely conceived to be? Resisting Dialogue reassesses our assumptions about dialogue and, in so doing, about what a politically healthy society should look like. Juan Meneses argues that, far from an unalloyed good, dialogue often serves as a subtle tool of domination, perpetuating the underlying inequalities it is intended to address.Meneses investigates how “illusory dialogue” (a particular dialogic encounter designed to secure consensus) is employed as an instrument that forestalls—instead of fostering—articulations of dissent that lead to political change. He does so through close readings of novels from the English-speaking world written in the past hundred years—from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and more. Resisting Dialogue demonstrates how these novels are rhetorical exercises with real political clout capable of restoring the radical potential of dialogue in today’s globalized world. Expanding the boundaries of postpolitical theory, Meneses reveals how these works offer ways to practice disagreement against this regulatory use of dialogue and expose the pitfalls of certain other dialogic interventions in relation to some of the most prominent questions of modern history: cosmopolitanism at the end of empire, the dangers of rewriting the historical record, the affective dimension of neoliberalism, the racial and nationalist underpinnings of the “war on terror,” and the visibility of environmental violence in the Anthropocene. Ultimately, Resisting Dialogue is a complex, provocative critique that, melding political and literary theory, reveals how fiction can help confront the deployment of dialogue to preempt the emergence of dissent and, thus, revitalize the practice of emancipatory politics. Trade Review"Deepening and widening a furrow first plowed by Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, Resisting Dialogue marks a refusal to underwrite ‘postpolitics’ as politics by insisting that unspeakable political ambition take its place, without apology, so that our voyage from a troubled modernist literature to the Anthropocene maps, simultaneously, a continuous trajectory and a jarring, disjunctive continuity."—Grant Farred, Cornell University"Resisting Dialogue draws on literature to develop a fresh vocabulary of political activism and thetic force. Contrarianism, deadlock, impasse, silence, resilience, persistence, the power of unexceptional figures of history to block and oppose the status quo—these immobilizing postures acquire a make-over as acts of agency that contest the eclipse of political agency besetting progressive theories of the Political."—Emily Apter, author of Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic "In all, Resisting Dialogue will be immensely useful for those conducting scholarly work in global studies across the disciplines, especially in the twentieth- and twenty-first century literary studies."—Project Muse "In attuning us to examine with greater sensitivity the political contours of dialogue... Meneses makes a genuinely original,impactful contribution to the study of the novel, as well as to political discourse and theory. "—American Literary History"Meneses changes the terms of a larger cultural debate about dialogue to reframe what is actually happening as the illusory manipulations of postpolitical power... in doing so, he demonstrates a promising correlation between reading imaginative texts and reading the world."—MFS Modern Fiction Studies"Resisting Dialogue is a crucial meditation on our fraught times of ever-deepening social, cultural and political divides, where all attempts at dialogue seem to be failing."—LSE Review of Books

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Book SynopsisA powerful new examination of the performative that asks “what’s next?” for this well-worn concept From its humble origins in J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory of the 1950s, the performative has grown to permeate wildly diverse scholarly fields, ranging from deconstruction and feminism to legal theory and even theories about the structure of matter. Here Jeffrey T. Nealon discovers how the performative will remain vital in the twenty-first century, arguing that it was never merely concerned with linguistic meaning but rather constitutes an insight into the workings of immaterial force.Fates of the Performative takes a deep dive into this “performative force” to think about the continued power and relevance of this wide-ranging concept. Offering both a history of the performative’s mutations and a diagnosis of its present state, Nealon traces how it has been deployed by key writers in the past sixty years, including foundational thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, and Judith Butler; contemporary theorists such as Thomas Piketty and Antonio Negri; and the “conceptual poetry” of Kenneth Goldsmith.Ultimately, Nealon’s inquiry is animated by one powerful question: what’s living and what’s dead in performative theory? In deconstructing the reaction against the performative in current humanist thought, Fates of the Performative opens up important conversations about systems theory, animal studies, object-oriented ontology, and the digital humanities. Nealon’s stirring appeal makes a necessary declaration of the performative’s continued power and relevance at a time of neoliberal ascendancy.Trade Review "What is 'the performative,' and why is it everywhere in contemporary thought? Jeffrey T. Nealon answers that question in this enlightening and witty book. In search of appropriate responses to our fact-free politics, Nealon offers sharp diagnoses of ‘post-critique’ and the ‘new materialism’ on the way to describing a resistant rhetoric to meet the challenges we face."—John McGowan, University of North Carolina "Fates of the Performative is a major intervention in the theory of the performative. Although performativity is not severed from language, in Jeffrey T. Nealon's view it is persuasively linked to the biopolitical. No theorist invested in the question of the biopolitical has gone down the path Nealon is following by proposing that we understand the embodied and the material, or the agency of the material, as a version of the performative. The idea that life doesn't adapt but performs—that it is distanced from itself by staging what it is—is a novel proposition, which means that this book will reorient theoretical debate about what the performative is and productively complicate our understanding of it."—Branka Arsić, Columbia University "Irreverent, funny and fast-paced, combative without being crabby, this book recycles its basic claims in a way that, against all odds, makes the book cohere."—American Literary History Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsPreface: Why the Performative?Part I. Genealogy of the Performative1. The Truth Is a Joke? Performatives in Austin and Derrida2. Two Paths You Can Go By: Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick3. The Bodacious Era: Thoreau and New Materialism; or, What’s Wrong with the Anthropocene?Part II. Performativity and/as/into Biopolitics4. Biopolitics, Marxism and Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century5. What Is a Lecturer? Performative, Parrhesia, and the Author-Function in Foucault’s Lecture Courses6. Literary RealFeel: Banality, Fatality, and Meaning in Kenneth Goldsmith’s The WeatherConclusion: On the Returns of Realism and the (Supposed) Exhaustion of CritiqueNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA powerful new examination of the performative that asks “what’s next?” for this well-worn concept From its humble origins in J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory of the 1950s, the performative has grown to permeate wildly diverse scholarly fields, ranging from deconstruction and feminism to legal theory and even theories about the structure of matter. Here Jeffrey T. Nealon discovers how the performative will remain vital in the twenty-first century, arguing that it was never merely concerned with linguistic meaning but rather constitutes an insight into the workings of immaterial force.Fates of the Performative takes a deep dive into this “performative force” to think about the continued power and relevance of this wide-ranging concept. Offering both a history of the performative’s mutations and a diagnosis of its present state, Nealon traces how it has been deployed by key writers in the past sixty years, including foundational thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, and Judith Butler; contemporary theorists such as Thomas Piketty and Antonio Negri; and the “conceptual poetry” of Kenneth Goldsmith.Ultimately, Nealon’s inquiry is animated by one powerful question: what’s living and what’s dead in performative theory? In deconstructing the reaction against the performative in current humanist thought, Fates of the Performative opens up important conversations about systems theory, animal studies, object-oriented ontology, and the digital humanities. Nealon’s stirring appeal makes a necessary declaration of the performative’s continued power and relevance at a time of neoliberal ascendancy.Trade Review "What is 'the performative,' and why is it everywhere in contemporary thought? Jeffrey T. Nealon answers that question in this enlightening and witty book. In search of appropriate responses to our fact-free politics, Nealon offers sharp diagnoses of ‘post-critique’ and the ‘new materialism’ on the way to describing a resistant rhetoric to meet the challenges we face."—John McGowan, University of North Carolina "Fates of the Performative is a major intervention in the theory of the performative. Although performativity is not severed from language, in Jeffrey T. Nealon's view it is persuasively linked to the biopolitical. No theorist invested in the question of the biopolitical has gone down the path Nealon is following by proposing that we understand the embodied and the material, or the agency of the material, as a version of the performative. The idea that life doesn't adapt but performs—that it is distanced from itself by staging what it is—is a novel proposition, which means that this book will reorient theoretical debate about what the performative is and productively complicate our understanding of it."—Branka Arsić, Columbia University "Irreverent, funny and fast-paced, combative without being crabby, this book recycles its basic claims in a way that, against all odds, makes the book cohere."—American Literary History Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsPreface: Why the Performative?Part I. Genealogy of the Performative1. The Truth Is a Joke? Performatives in Austin and Derrida2. Two Paths You Can Go By: Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick3. The Bodacious Era: Thoreau and New Materialism; or, What’s Wrong with the Anthropocene?Part II. Performativity and/as/into Biopolitics4. Biopolitics, Marxism and Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century5. What Is a Lecturer? Performative, Parrhesia, and the Author-Function in Foucault’s Lecture Courses6. Literary RealFeel: Banality, Fatality, and Meaning in Kenneth Goldsmith’s The WeatherConclusion: On the Returns of Realism and the (Supposed) Exhaustion of CritiqueNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThis text provides a lively introduction to the developments in philosophy of language in this century, and to the way these have impinged upon religious language. Included is the relevance of analytical philosophy of language, but the text also covers important historical debates about religious language that have had increasing impact upon biblical studies and theology.Trade Review"This is an excellent critical survey of the modern philosophy of language in general, and of religious language in particular, deftly set against the background of its traditional forerunners. It is readable, colourful, and richly informative, without being simplistic or sweeping in its descriptions and judgements." Steven Kings, Reviews in Religion and Theology "Dan Stiver offers, for "tose coming to these topics for the first time", a useful map to an academic (sub)discipline called philosophy of religious language." Brian Davies, Anglican Theological ReviewTable of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgements xiii 1 Introduction 1 The Linguistic Turn in Philosophy 4 The Linguistic Turn in Religion 6 Philosophical Foundations 8 2 Historical Approaches to Religious Language 14 Three Traditional Ways 15 The negative way 16 The Univocal way 20 The Analogical way 23 The Universal Controversy 29 Literal and Allegorical Exegesis 31 3 The Falsification Challenge 37 The Early Wittgenstein 37 Logical Positivism 42 The Falsification Challenge 47 4 Language Game 59 The Later Wittgenstein 59 Religious Language as Noncognitive 67 Wittgenstein on religion 67 Wittgensteinian fideism 69 Religious Language as Cognitive 72 John Wisdom 73 Ian T. Ramsey 74 Ian Crombie 78 Speech-act Theory 79 Austin 80 McClendon and Smith 82 5 Hermeneutical Philosophy 87 From Religious to General Hermeneutics 87 Ontological Hermeneutics 90 Critical Hermeneutics 96 Ricoeur and Critical Hermeneutics 100 Reader-response Theory 107 6 Metaphor, Symbol and Analogy 112 Metaphor as Ornamental 113 Metaphor as Cognitive 114 Symbol and Analogy 122 Metaphor in Exegesis 127 Metaphor in Theology 129 7 Narrative Theology 134 The Chicago School 135 The Yale School 139 Hans Frei 140 George Lindbeck 145 Ronald Thiemann 150 The California School 154 James Wm McClendon Jr 154 Michael Goldberg 155 Terrence Tilley 159 8 Structuralism and Poststructuralism 163 Structuralism 163 De Saussure’s influence on Structuralism 163 Structuralist thinkers 166 Critique 171 Structuralism in Religious Studies 173 Ricoeur 174 Thiselton 175 Patte 177 Crossan and Via 178 Poststructuralism 180 Derrida 181 Foucault 184 Critique 186 Poststructuralism in Religious Studies 188 9 Conclusion: A Changing Paradigm 193 Reducing the Contrasts 194 A Changing Paradigm 197 Religious Language and Truth 201 Notes 206 Recommended Reading 246 Index 251

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Book SynopsisThis is an anthology of landmark essays in the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and cognitive science since 1950. It includes essays that aim to reflect the fact that philosophy and the science of mind and language have close historical and conceptual ties. Each section begins with a brief and simple overview highlighting the issues and recommending other readings. The combination of this editorial material with a selection of classic essays makes this anthology a very flexible tool for introductory courses in cognitive science, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology as well as courses devoted to contemporary analytic philosophy. However, the book also contains significant advanced and recent material, making it suitable for more advanced stud, including beginning graduate courses.Trade Review"Most of the essays in Readings in Language and Mind have appeared previously in many other places. However, the special attention given to language in this context is indeed unique and distinguishes it from other anthologies." Pragmatics and Cognition "Readings in Lnaguage and Mind collects classic writings in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind of the last 40-50 years, including important relevant items from linguistics and cognitive science. It's an excellent collection to give students a basic foundation to understand the background of current philosophical inquiry." Professor Gilbert Harman, Princeton UniversityTable of ContentsPreface. Acknowledgements. Philosophy of Language and Mind, 1950-90: Tyler Burge. Part I: The Meaning of Language: . 1. Natural and Formal Lnaguages. 2. Language and Communication. 3. Language and Environment. Part II: The Meaning of Mind: . 4. Language and Mind. 5. Mind and Machine. 6. Mind and Biology. 7. Mind and Environment. Part III: The Science of Mind and Language:. 8. Language and Cognition. 9. Artificial Intelligence. Index.

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Book SynopsisShows that the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) forms a philosophy of dialogue and communication that is crucially relevant to contemporary debates in the Humanities. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) is the progenitor of modern linguistics and the originator of the modern teaching and research university. However, his work has received remarkably little attention in the English-speaking world. Humboldt conceives language as the source of cognition as well as communication, both rooted in the possibility of human dialogue. In the same way, his idea of the university posits the free encounter between radically different personalities as the source of education for freedom. For Humboldt, both linguistic and intellectual communication are predicated firstly on dialogue between persons, which is the prerequisite for all intercultural understanding. Linking Humboldt's concept of dialogue to his idea of translation between languages, persons, and cultures, this book shows how Humboldt's thought is of great contemporary relevance. Humboldt shows a way beyond the false alternatives of "culturalism" (the demand that a plurality of cultural and faith-based traditions be recognized as sources of ethical and political legitimacy in the modern world) and "universalism" (the assertion of the primacy of a universal culture of human rights and the renewal of the European Enlightenment project). John Walker explains how Humboldt's work emerges from the intellectual conflicts of his time and yet directly addresses the concerns of our own post-secular and multicultural age.Trade ReviewThis book is not only an important contribution to the Anglo-American scholarship on Wilhelm von Humboldt. It also constitutes an inspiring enrichment of a multitude of contemporary debates of high social and political relevance and thus demonstrates the prime importance of Humanities research for our time. -- Professor Dr Marko Pajevic, College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, University of TartuTable of ContentsPreface A Note on Texts List of Abbreviations Introduction 1: Humboldt and the Dialectic of Enlightenment: Language, Culture, and Freedom 2: Language, Dialogue, and Translation: The Human Relevance of the Comparative Study of Language 3: Language Interaction and Language Change: Humboldt on the Kawi Language of Java 4: Humboldt, "Orientalism," and Understanding the Other 5: Humboldt, Translation, and Dialogue between Faiths: Emmanuel Levinas, Stanley Hauerwas, and Shahab Ahmed 6: Scriptural Reasoning: Dialogue and Translation in Practice 7: Secularity and Communities of Faith in the Public Sphere 8: Wilhelm von Humboldt: Translation, Dialogue, and the Modern University Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThis volume presents the author's view of the scope of linguistic description, insofar as the field of linguistics touches on questions of the meanings of sentences. Fillmore takes the subject matter of linguistics, in its grammatical, semantic and pragmatic sub-divisions, to include the full catalogue of knowledge which the speakers of a language can be said to possess about the structure of the sentences in their language, and their knowledge about the appropriate use of these sentences. In the author's view, the special explanatory task of linguistics is to discover the principles which underlie such knowledge. Fillmore chooses to study the range of information which the speakers of a language possess about the sentences in their language by thoroughly examining one simple English sentence.Table of Contents1. 'May we come in?'; 2. Space; 3. Time; 4. Deixis I; 5. Coming and going; 6. Deixis II.

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Book SynopsisThis book is an exploration of current trends in logical theories of information flow across various fields.

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Book SynopsisThis book includes famous papers such as "The Problem of the Essential Indexical" and Frege on "Demonstratives and Cognitive Significance and New Theories of Reference"; papers co-authored with Mark Crimmins ("The Prince and the Phone Booth") and David Israel ("Fodor on Psychological Explanations") and related papers on situation semantics, direct reference, and the structure of belief. Perry has added afterwords that discuss responses to his work by Gareth Evans, Robert Stalnaker, Barbara Partee, Howard Wettstein and others. The word "I" is called an indexical which means who it stands for depends on who says it, not just on its meaning. Other indexicals are "you," "here" and "now." Perry discusses how these words work, and why they express important philosophical thoughts. He claims that indexicals pose a challenge to traditional assumptions about language and thought, and for that reason a number of these papers sparked lively debates.Table of ContentsIndexicals, contexts and unarticulated constituents; Reality without reference; Evading the slingshot; Broadening the mind; Myself and I; Reflexivity, indexicality and names; Rip Van Winkle and other characters; Frege on demonstratives; The problem of the essential indexical; Belief and acceptance; A problem about continued belief; Castandeda on he and I; Perception, action, and the structure of believing; From worlds to situations; Possible worlds to situations; Circumstantial attitudes and benevolent cognition; Thought without representation; Cognitive significance and new theories of reference; The prince and the phone booth; Individuals in Informational and Intentional content; Fodor and psychological explanations.

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Book SynopsisRapid innovations in digital technology deeply influence views on language and information processing. Any new developments raise many questions for researchers, and can help shed new light on old approaches. Logic is a tool that researchers can use to gain insight into investigations of the relation between form and content, the ways that linguistic utterances change information content and the dynamics of information change. This text presents a broad range of logical investigations into language and information processing. Topics covered include: the notion of "reasonable belief" in commonsense reasoning, perpetual reports in natural languages, the logic of creation and modification of objects, the verification of temporal aspects of reactive systems, analysis of scope by combining model theory and situation semantics, and semantic analysis of the information articulation of linguistic statements.

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Book SynopsisIn this volume, author John Perry develops a "reflexive-referential" account of indexicals, demonstratives and proper names. On these issues the philosophy of language in the 20th century was shaped by two competing traditions, descriptivist and referentialist. Referentialist tradition is portrayed as holding that indexicals contribute content that involves individuals without identifying conditions on them. Descriptivist tradition is portrayed as holding that referential content does not explain all of the identifying conditions conveyed by names and indexicals. This text reveals a coherent and structured family of contents - from reflexive contents that place conditions on their actual utterance to the fully incremental contents that place conditions only on the objects of reference - reconciling the insights of both traditions.

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Book SynopsisThis lucid and wide-ranging volume constitutes a self-contained introduction to the elements and key issues of the philosophy of language.Trade Review"The best blend of technical competence, philosophical sophistication and topical coverage currently available in an introduction to the philosophy of language." Robert M. Harnish, University of Arizona "This is a first-rate introduction to the topics and philosophers it covers, from Frege through theories of truth to intentional semantics, the metaphysics of modality, translation, language in action, speech acts, and more. The book is well-written, clear, accessible, and thorough. Many students will be stimulated to explore the issues further, and will have a solid base from which to do so." John F. Post, Vanderbilt UniversityTable of Contents1. Fregean Beginnings. 2. Definite Descriptions and Other Objects of Wonder. 3. Truth and Meaning: the Tarskian Paradigm. 4. Foundations of Intentional Semantics. 5. Language and Context. 6. Language in Action.

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Book SynopsisThis lucid and wide-ranging volume constitutes a self-contained introduction to the elements and key issues of the philosophy of language.Trade Review"The best blend of technical competence, philosophical sophistication and topical coverage currently available in an introduction to the philosophy of language." Robert M. Harnish, University of Arizona "This is a first-rate introduction to the topics and philosophers it covers, from Frege through theories of truth to intentional semantics, the metaphysics of modality, translation, language in action, speech acts, and more. The book is well-written, clear, accessible, and thorough. Many students will be stimulated to explore the issues further, and will have a solid base from which to do so." John F. Post, Vanderbilt UniversityTable of Contents1. Fregean Beginnings. 2. Definite Descriptions and Other Objects of Wonder. 3. Truth and Meaning: the Tarskian Paradigm. 4. Foundations of Intentional Semantics. 5. Language and Context. 6. Language in Action.

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Book SynopsisIn this book, renowned philosopher John Perry responds to criticisms of his influential writing on “the essential indexical.” He begins by explaining the conclusions of his past articles. He then argues that many criticisms are based on confusions about the relation between the issues of opacity and cognitive significance, and other basic misunderstandings of his views. While dealing with criticisms, Perry makes a number of points about self-knowledge, the issue that motivated his original papers.

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Book SynopsisWhy are facts and statistics disparaged and dismissed, now more than ever? Why do people trust 'fake news'? If we have 'had enough of experts' who should we listen to? Rather than the possible collapse of modern society, could this be an opportunity to look at not just society but our own lives in a different way? Whoever controls the narrative is the one who is in control. Time’s Lie analyses the history, the science and the philosophy behind the creation of linear stories, or Narrativisation, as this book dubs it. 'The importance of understanding how we frame the world through story cannot be overstated. Leo has tapped into something really profound with Time's Lie.' Jared Bauer, Wisecrack

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Book SynopsisThis book explores an evolutionary theory of scientific knowledge, and provides the basis for a new linguistic approach to methodology.Including an original essay by the late Thomas Kuhn, this volume takes inspiration from his work in history and the philosophy of sciences. The authors highlight the critical importance of the relationship between the process of learning a language and translation, and use this to examine scientific language and interpretation. They also analyse the relationship between grammatical structure and theoretical communication in science and apply their findings to the rhetoric of Smith and Keynes. They assess the pragmatical dimension of language in the construction of knowledge, and examine its role in explaining economic behaviour and in interpreting the relationship between economics and philosophy. Finally, the authors analyse the relationship between incommensurable standards and translation from the point of view of the logical structure of lexicon, and examine the traditional theme of the 'unity of science' across the whole spectrum of humanities and the social sciences.Table of ContentsContents: Preface Part I: Incommensurability, Translation and Theory Change Part II: Communicating Science Part III: Cognition and Formal Reconstruction Part IV: Lexicon and Semantics Index

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Book SynopsisSituation theory is the result of an interdisciplinary effort to create a full-fledged theory of information. Created by scholars and scientists from cognitive science, computer science and AI, linguistics, logic, philosophy, and mathematics, it aims to provide a common set of tools for the analysis of phenomena from all these fields. Unlike Shannon-Weaver type theories of information, which are purely quantitative theories, situation theory aims at providing tools for the analysis of the specific content of a situation (signal, message, data base, statement, or other information-carrying situation). The question addressed is not how much information is carried, but what information is carried.

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Book SynopsisThis open access book addresses communicative aspects of the current COVID-19 pandemic as well as the epidemic of misinformation from the perspective of argumentation theory. Argumentation theory is uniquely placed to understand and account for the challenges of public reason as expressed through argumentative discourse. The book thus focuses on the extent to which the forms, norms and functions of public argumentation have changed in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. This question is investigated along the three main research lines of the COST Action project CA 17132: European network for Argumentation and Public PoLicY analysis (APPLY): descriptive, normative, and prescriptive. The volume offers a broad range of contributions which treat argumentative phenomena that are directly related to the changes in public discourse in the wake of the outburst of COVID-19. The volume additionally places particular emphasis on expert argumentation, given (i) the importance expert discourse has had over the last two years, and (ii) the challenges that expert argumentation has faced in the public sphere as a result of scientific uncertainty and widespread misinformation. Contributions are divided into three groups, which (i) examine various features and aspects of public and institutional discourse about the COVID-19 pandemic, (ii) scrutinize the way health policies have been discussed, debated, attacked and defended in the public sphere, and (iii) consider a range of proposals meant to improve the quality of public discourse, and public deliberation in particular, in such a way that concrete proposals for argumentative literacy will be brought to light. Overall, this volume constitutes a timely inquiry into all things argumentative in pandemic discourse. This volume is of interest to a broad readership including philosophers, linguists, communication and legal scholars, and members of the wider public who seek to better understand the discourse surrounding communicative phenomena in times of crisis.COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a funding organisation for research and innovation networks. For more information: www.cost.euTable of ContentsChapter 1. The Pandemic of Argumentation.- Part I: Arguing About The Pandemic.- Chapter 2. Arguing About “COVID”: Metalinguistic Arguments on What Counts As A “Covid-19 Death”. Chapter 3. ‘Covid-19’: Meaning and Reference.- Chapter 4. Political Interference and Argumentative Styles.- Chapter 5. The Evaluative Component in Pragmatic Argumentation: An Analysis of Public Discourse During the First Wave of the Sars-Cov-2 Pandemic in Italy.- Chapter 6. Spaces of Argumentation and their Interaction: Some Elements of Thought Inspired by Controversies and Dispute in France During the Covid-19 Crisis.- Chapter 7. The Argumentative Potential of Doubt: From Legitimate Concerns to Conspiracy Theories About Covid-19 Vaccines. Chapter 8. Analysing the Public Debate About Lockdown.- Chapter 9. Responding to the COVID Conspiracy Theories: Why Narratives Themselves are More Powerful Arguments than Fact-Checking.- Chapter 10. Reshaping Society through an Expanded Understanding of the Role of Analogy: Or How the Co-Vid Crisis Can Lead to a Better World.- Chapter 11. Expert Uncertainty: Arguments Bolstering the Ethos of Expertise in Situations of Uncertainty.- Chapter 12. Conditional Perfection, Scientific Schizophrenia and Political Decisions: On the Argumentative Dark Side of Pandemic Discourse.- Part II: Justifying and Promoting Health Policies.- Chapter 13. Good and Ought in Argumentation: COVID-19 as a Case Study.- Chapter 14. Visual Argumentation and Law: Broadcasting and Justifying the Norms During the Pandemic.- Chapter 15. Securitisation and the Rediscovery of the Invisible Enemy in Times of Pandemic: Analysing Political Discourses from the European South.- Chapter 16. The UK Government’s ‘Balancing Act’ in the Pandemic. Arguing from Competing Concerns: Lives, Livelihoods and Liberties.- Chapter 17. Practical Conflicts between Law and Morality: An Argumentative Analysis of the Case of Coronavirus Contact-Tracing Apps.- Chapter 18. How to Deal with Deep Disagreements? The Role of Rhetoric in Crisis Communication: The Case of COVID-19.- Chapter 19. On Arguments from Ignorance in Policy-Making.- Chapter 20. Persuasion, Politics, and COVID-19: Audience as a Political Category.- Part III: Elements of Argumentative Literacy.- Chapter 21. Inoculating Students Against Conspiracy Theories: The Case of Covid-19.- Chapter 22. Staying up to Date with Argument Checking: Outdated News as Defeasible Arguments.- Chapter 23. Combatting Conspiratorial Thinking with Controlled Argumentation Dialogue Environments.- Chapter 24. Is Interpretation of Conspiracy Theories done in a Fair and Useful Way?.- Chapter 25. How to Handle Reasonable Disagreement: The Case of Covid-19.- Chapter 26. Constructing Arguments about COVID-19 Governmental Guidelines.- Chapter 27. “I (Don’t) Agree with You, So You Are (In)Competent” The Role of One’s Own Opinion in Accepting Arguments from Expert Opinion.

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Book SynopsisThis edited volume on contextualism and pragmatics is interdisciplinary in character and contains contributions from linguistics, cognitive science and socio-pragmatics. Going beyond conventional contextual matters of truth-conditions and pragmatic intrusion, this text deals with a variety of issues including hyperbole, synonymy, reference, argumentation, schizophrenia, rationality, morality, silence and clinical pragmatics. Contributions also address the semantics/pragmatics debate and show to what extent the theory of contextualism can be applied. This volume is based on a unitary research project financed by the University of Messina and appeals to students and researchers working in linguistics and the philosophy of language. Table of Contents0. IntroductionAlessandro Capone, Assunta PennaI. Pragmalinguistics- Chapter 1. Reference in Context. Alessandro Capone- Chapter 2. For a definition of hyperbole as operative on the scenes of the ancient Greektheatre: situations and lexicon. Paola Radici Colace- Chapter 3. Synonymy and contextual dependence. Grazia BasileII. Performativity and social pragmatics- Chapter 4. Genre as a context for persuasion: the construction of identities in differentforms of institutionalised discourse. A case study. Francesca Santulli- Chapter 5. Pragmatics, Metaphor Studies and the Challenge of Mental Imagery. StefanaGarello, Marco Carapezza- Chapter 6. Material engagement and mediation: two necessary concepts. Francesco Parisi- Chapter 7. Silence as a meaning framework. Antonia Cava- Chapter 8. Schtroumpf: forms of life and forms of talk. Assunta PennaIII. Neurocognition and Clinical studies- Chapter 9. Cognitive-Linguistic Difficulties in COVID-19. Louise Cummings- Chapter 10. Reasoning as a tool at the service of our goals. Amelia Gangemi- Chapter 11. When context really matters: the case of schizophrenia. Valentina Cardella- Chapter 12. Beyond the Meaning of Words: Issues in Neuropragmatics, ClinicalPragmatics and Schizophrenic Language. Rosalia Cavalieri, Antonino Bucca- Chapter 13. Moral enhancement and contextualism: some reasons for the unattainability ofthe program for moralizing people. Consuelo Luverà- Chapter 14. Clinical pragmatics and contextualism. Roberto Graci

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Book SynopsisThis book covers the topic of discourse and argumentation in archaeology with an aim to serve the archaeology community. The book presents discourse and argument analysis approaches and techniques in an affordable manner and applied to archaeological situations. It focuses on techniques and approaches that can be applicable to multiple situations, periods and cultures. The book begins with an introduction to discourse and argumentation analysis as a general field and also as an auxiliary technique to archaeology. The work includes conceptual applications, ranging from causality, ontological connections, vagueness, social production of discourse and public debates. The work also devotes a section to computational approaches and describes the specifics of some well-known families of algorithms such as lexical processing, information extraction or sentiment analysis. The conclusion comments on the future and which reflects on the previous chapters and discusses how the presented techniques and approaches should be adapted or improved for easier and more powerful application to archaeology. Contributing authors bring perspectives from archaeology, linguistics, and computer science.Trade Review Table of ContentsChapter 1. Introduction to Discourse Analysis and Argumentation Theory (Martín Pereira-Fariña).- Part 1. Conceptual Approaches.- Chapter 2. A New Approach to Interoperable Argumentation Documentation (Stephen Stead).- Chapter 3. Making Good Arguments in Archaeology (Michael E. Smith).- Chapter 4. A Causal Model Application to a Cultural Heritage Sentence Analysis (Alejandro Sobrino).- Chapter 5. What Archaeological Texts Argue About: Denotations and Ontological Proxies (Cesar Gonzalez-Perez).- Chapter 6. The Social Production of Discourse in Archaeology (Isto Huvila).- Chapter 7. Dealing with Vagueness in Archaeological Discourses (Cesar Gonzalez-Perez).- Chapter 8. Extending Discourse Analysis in Archaeology: A Multimodal Approach (Jeremy Huggett).- Part 2. Computational Techniques.- Chapter 9. Computer Processing of Language: Where Archaeological Discourse and Computers Meet (Patricia Martín-Rodilla).- Chapter 10. NLP and Archaeology: A View from a Digital Archive (Holly Wright)- Chapter 11. Information Extraction and Machine Learning for Archaeological Texts (Alex Brandsen).- Chapter 12. Argument Mining and Analytics in Archaeology (John Lawrence).- Chapter 13. Computational Processing of Language Vagueness for Archaeological Site Modelling (Maria Elena Castiello).- Part 3. The Future.- Chapter 14. Future Directions (Cesar Gonzalez-Perez).

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The Gongsun Longzi is often considered the only extant work of the Classical Chinese “School of Names”, an early intellectual tradition (trad. dated to the 4th cent. B.C.) mainly concerned with logic and the philosophy of language. The Gongsun Longzi is a heterogeneous collection of five chapters that include short treatises and largely fictive dialogues between an anonymous persuader and his opponent, which typically revolve around a paradoxical claim. Its value as a testimony to Early Chinese philosophy, however, is somewhat controversial due to the intricate textual history of the text and our limited knowledge about its intellectual backgrounds. This volume gathers contributions by leading specialists in the fields of Classical Chinese philosophy, philology, logic, and linguistics. Besides an overview of the scholarly literature on the topic and a detailed account of the reception of the text throughout time, it presents fresh insights into philological and philosophical problems raised by the Gongsun Longzi and other closely-related texts equally attributed to the “School of Names”.

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Book Synopsis Our understanding of CS Peirce, and his semiotics, is largely influenced by a twentieth century perspective that prioritizes the sign as a cultural artifact, or as one that that 'distorts', in some way, our understanding of the empirical world. Such a perspective will always undermine appreciation of Peirce as a philosopher who viewed signs as the very mechanisms that enable us to understand reality through concept formation. The key to this repositioning of Peirce is to place his work in the broad frame of Hegelian philosophy. This book evaluates, in detail, the parallels that exist between Peircean and Hegelian thought, highlighting their convergences and also the points at which Peirce departs from Hegel's position. It also considers the work of Vygotsky on concept formation showing that both are, in fact, working within the same Hegelian template. This book, therefore, contributes to our broader understanding of Peircean semiotics. But by drawing in Vygotsky, under the same theoretical auspices, it demonstrates that Peirce has much to offer contemporary educational learning theory.

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Book SynopsisThis book examines practices on the relationship between sign and meaning in the Pre-Imperial period of China from the semiotics perspective. Although the Chinese civilization did not develop a comprehensive semiotics system in that period, they are highly semiotic in many ways. The thinking and application of signs of Chinese people can be found in many classics, such as The Book of Changes, The Analects of Confucius, Tao De Jing and Zhuangzi. This book begins its study by re-examining the semiotic thoughts contained in The Book of Changes and inquiries into the thoughts of the major philosophers of different schools. It provides insights into the findings of these philosophers concerning the relationship between sign and meaning. In particular, it concentrates on how the prosperity of the various contending semiotic thoughts complemented each other in forming a sign system. In addition, the book also emphasizes the wholeness and associativity of observing things and studying relevant signs of Chinese people. As the first monograph in any language to systematically summarize Chinese semiotic thought in the Pre-Imperial period, this book helps promote understanding of the traditional Chinese culture and mindset.Table of ContentsSemiotic Significance of Zhouyi.- Confucian’s Thoughts on Semiotics.- Semiotic Thoughts in Taoism.- Semiotic Thoughts of the School of Names and Mohist School.- The Endgame of Pre-imperial Semiotic Thoughts.

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Book Synopsisaeo A clear and comprehensive introduction to Chomskya s work, dealing with his contributions to linguistics, philosophy, social and political thought. aeo Describes Chomskya s rationalist view of mind and human nature in a more systematic way than Chomsky himself has and investigates why this view is the most plausible one.Trade Review'This is the best all around introduction to Chomsky's work that I know of. However, it is far more than an introduction. It is an ambitious synthesis of all parts of Chomsky's views written in a manner accessible to a beginner yet thought provoking for those deeply immersed in Chomskyana. It considers Chomsky's work in the wider context of cultural and classical philosophical views on human nature, knowledge and mind. In addition, McGilvray shuns no part of Chomsky's vast work. He provides accessible and illuminating discussions of both his theoretical work in grammar, his philosophical views on the structure of mind and his political views. I recommend McGilvray's work both to neophytes interested in an introduction to Chomsky's thought and to experts interested in an illuminating discussion of "how it all hangs together".' Professor Norbert Hornstein, University of Maryland 'This well written and insightful book explains accurately Chomsky's ideas about mind, language, and social ideas. Its presentation of key concepts is accessible to laypersons and is informative to the experts as well. Chomsky's key contributions to philosophy and the social sciences are well articulated. The book should be read by the general public, and all philosophers and social scientists.' Professor Julius Moravcsik, Department of Philosophy, University of StanfordTable of ContentsAbbreviations. Acknowledgments. Introduction. 1. Common Sense and Science. 2. Mapping the Mind. 3. Poverty, Creativity, and Making the World. 4. Languages and the Science of Language. 5. How to Make an Expression. 6. Meanings and Their Use. 7. Anarchosyndicalism and the Responsible Intellectual. 8. Human Nature and Ideal Social Organization. Notes. References. Index.

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