James Underhill
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748638420
- eISBN:
- 9780748671809
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638420.001.0001
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Theoretical Linguistics
This book investigates the vigorous and inspiring linguistic philosophy of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Many English-speaking authors speak of a ‘Humboldtian tradition’ and associate Humboldt's name with ...
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This book investigates the vigorous and inspiring linguistic philosophy of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Many English-speaking authors speak of a ‘Humboldtian tradition’ and associate Humboldt's name with research into linguistic relativism and the work of Whorf. But few scholars quote Humboldt's writings, and those who do, often prove only that they fail to perceive the great scope of his work and that they are incapable of seizing the essential principles of Humboldt's ethnolinguistic project. Hegel, Chomsky, Crystal and Habermas all try understand Humboldt through the prism of their own approach to language and ideas. The present work, tries to set the record straight, and to demonstrate why Humboldt's linguistic philosophy will take us much farther than the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Humboldt's work lays down a challenge to philosophy, which has difficulty in taking into account language as it is created and maintained in the world. At the same time, it represents no less of a challenge to approaches to language which seek to step over individual writing and speech, and speak of ‘language’ in abstraction, or seek the deeper structures of cognition. Humboldt takes us back to the origin of language, speech. His concept of language is supra-subjective. Individuals become individuals through language, through conversation in linguistic communities. At the same time Humboldt takes us back to languages in all their diversity. Finding something universal in that diversity, and something essentially specific in each facet of the universal faculty of language is the twin force of Humboldt's vast synthesis of empirical findings.Less
This book investigates the vigorous and inspiring linguistic philosophy of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Many English-speaking authors speak of a ‘Humboldtian tradition’ and associate Humboldt's name with research into linguistic relativism and the work of Whorf. But few scholars quote Humboldt's writings, and those who do, often prove only that they fail to perceive the great scope of his work and that they are incapable of seizing the essential principles of Humboldt's ethnolinguistic project. Hegel, Chomsky, Crystal and Habermas all try understand Humboldt through the prism of their own approach to language and ideas. The present work, tries to set the record straight, and to demonstrate why Humboldt's linguistic philosophy will take us much farther than the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Humboldt's work lays down a challenge to philosophy, which has difficulty in taking into account language as it is created and maintained in the world. At the same time, it represents no less of a challenge to approaches to language which seek to step over individual writing and speech, and speak of ‘language’ in abstraction, or seek the deeper structures of cognition. Humboldt takes us back to the origin of language, speech. His concept of language is supra-subjective. Individuals become individuals through language, through conversation in linguistic communities. At the same time Humboldt takes us back to languages in all their diversity. Finding something universal in that diversity, and something essentially specific in each facet of the universal faculty of language is the twin force of Humboldt's vast synthesis of empirical findings.
David Nowell Smith
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823251537
- eISBN:
- 9780823252947
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823251537.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Language
Sounding/Silence charts Heidegger's deep engagement with poetry, situating it within the internal dynamics of his thought and within the domains of poetics and literary criticism. Heidegger viewed ...
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Sounding/Silence charts Heidegger's deep engagement with poetry, situating it within the internal dynamics of his thought and within the domains of poetics and literary criticism. Heidegger viewed poetics and literary criticism with notorious disdain: he claimed that his Erläuterungen (“soundings”) of Hölderlin's poetry were not “contributions to aesthetics and literary history” but rather stemmed “from a necessity for thought.” And yet, the questions he poses—the value of significance of prosody and trope, the concept of “poetic language,” the relation between language and body, the “truth” of poetry—reach to the very heart of poetics as a discipline, and indeed situate Heidegger within a wider history of thinking on poetry and poetics. Opening up points of contact between Heidegger's discussions of poetry and technical and critical analyses of these poems, David Nowell Smith addresses a lacuna within Heidegger scholarship and sets off from Heidegger's thought to sketch a philosophical “poetics of limit”.Less
Sounding/Silence charts Heidegger's deep engagement with poetry, situating it within the internal dynamics of his thought and within the domains of poetics and literary criticism. Heidegger viewed poetics and literary criticism with notorious disdain: he claimed that his Erläuterungen (“soundings”) of Hölderlin's poetry were not “contributions to aesthetics and literary history” but rather stemmed “from a necessity for thought.” And yet, the questions he poses—the value of significance of prosody and trope, the concept of “poetic language,” the relation between language and body, the “truth” of poetry—reach to the very heart of poetics as a discipline, and indeed situate Heidegger within a wider history of thinking on poetry and poetics. Opening up points of contact between Heidegger's discussions of poetry and technical and critical analyses of these poems, David Nowell Smith addresses a lacuna within Heidegger scholarship and sets off from Heidegger's thought to sketch a philosophical “poetics of limit”.
David Nowell Smith
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823251537
- eISBN:
- 9780823252947
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823251537.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Language
This chapter approaches Heidegger's thinking on language through the motif of ‘naming’. Naming is not simply an unmediated saying of being, but rather a quasi-performative ‘bringing-into-name’, by ...
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This chapter approaches Heidegger's thinking on language through the motif of ‘naming’. Naming is not simply an unmediated saying of being, but rather a quasi-performative ‘bringing-into-name’, by which beings are ‘gathered’ into presence by language. At the same time, it allows Heidegger to address a key question: how verbal language can shape the originary intelligibility of logos. The chapter pursues Heidegger's model of verbal language, arguing that it should be understood as a ‘sounding’ rather than as signification – a sounding that rises out of a double silence: that of the logos itself, and that of the opacity of the human body.Less
This chapter approaches Heidegger's thinking on language through the motif of ‘naming’. Naming is not simply an unmediated saying of being, but rather a quasi-performative ‘bringing-into-name’, by which beings are ‘gathered’ into presence by language. At the same time, it allows Heidegger to address a key question: how verbal language can shape the originary intelligibility of logos. The chapter pursues Heidegger's model of verbal language, arguing that it should be understood as a ‘sounding’ rather than as signification – a sounding that rises out of a double silence: that of the logos itself, and that of the opacity of the human body.
C. Kavin Rowe
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780300180121
- eISBN:
- 9780300182101
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300180121.003.0010
- Subject:
- Religion, Philosophy of Religion
This chapter concludes the book by arguing that the conflict between rival traditions of life cannot be resolved ahead of the time it takes to live a human life in devotion to the claims of one ...
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This chapter concludes the book by arguing that the conflict between rival traditions of life cannot be resolved ahead of the time it takes to live a human life in devotion to the claims of one tradition or another. In discussion with the work of Jeffrey Stout, Alasdair MacIntyre, and others, the chapter shows that a “translation” between the Stoic and Christian traditions is impossible and the difference they exhibit remains permanent. They both claim their tradition is the true way to live, but there is no way to evaluate such claims apart from the life that it would take to live them. Studying rival traditions is thus an exploration in the limits of reason and in reason’s ability to overcome the summons to live according to the truth. Pascal and Kierkegaard were correct: we wager or leap before we know the truth of what we do.Less
This chapter concludes the book by arguing that the conflict between rival traditions of life cannot be resolved ahead of the time it takes to live a human life in devotion to the claims of one tradition or another. In discussion with the work of Jeffrey Stout, Alasdair MacIntyre, and others, the chapter shows that a “translation” between the Stoic and Christian traditions is impossible and the difference they exhibit remains permanent. They both claim their tradition is the true way to live, but there is no way to evaluate such claims apart from the life that it would take to live them. Studying rival traditions is thus an exploration in the limits of reason and in reason’s ability to overcome the summons to live according to the truth. Pascal and Kierkegaard were correct: we wager or leap before we know the truth of what we do.
Mark Migotti and Nicole Wyatt
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780262036689
- eISBN:
- 9780262341981
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262036689.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
If a sex robot is a robot is a robot with whom (or which) we can have sex, then we need to know what it is to have sex with a robot. In order to know this, we need to know what it is to have sex, and ...
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If a sex robot is a robot is a robot with whom (or which) we can have sex, then we need to know what it is to have sex with a robot. In order to know this, we need to know what it is to have sex, and what a robot is. This chapter examines the first question, what is it to have sex. It argues that having sex can be understood as a an epitome of being sexual together in much the same way having a conversation can be understood as an epitome of what Paul Grice calls a “talk exchange”. The answer to this question sheds some light on the second by telling us some of the criteria a robot would have to meet before we could plausibly have sex with it. The chapter concludes that as long as the sex robots in question do not exercise real agency, then sexual relationships between human beings will continue to offer something that sexual activity involving the sex robots does not.Less
If a sex robot is a robot is a robot with whom (or which) we can have sex, then we need to know what it is to have sex with a robot. In order to know this, we need to know what it is to have sex, and what a robot is. This chapter examines the first question, what is it to have sex. It argues that having sex can be understood as a an epitome of being sexual together in much the same way having a conversation can be understood as an epitome of what Paul Grice calls a “talk exchange”. The answer to this question sheds some light on the second by telling us some of the criteria a robot would have to meet before we could plausibly have sex with it. The chapter concludes that as long as the sex robots in question do not exercise real agency, then sexual relationships between human beings will continue to offer something that sexual activity involving the sex robots does not.
Arianna Betti
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780262029216
- eISBN:
- 9780262329644
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262029216.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
Against facts argues that we have no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world, at least as they are described by the two major metaphysical theories of facts. Neither of these theories ...
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Against facts argues that we have no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world, at least as they are described by the two major metaphysical theories of facts. Neither of these theories is tenable—neither the theory according to which facts are special structured building blocks of reality nor the theory according to which facts are whatever is named by certain expressions of the form “the fact that such and such.” There is reality, and there are entities in reality that we are able to name, but among these entities there are no facts. Drawing on metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and linguistics, Against facts examines the main arguments in favor of and against facts of the two major sorts, distinguished as compositional and propositional, giving special attention to methodological presuppositions. Compositional facts (facts as special structured building blocks of reality) and the central argument for them, Armstrong’s truthmaker argument are criticized in part I. Propositional facts (facts as whatever is named in “the fact that” statements) and what Against facts calls the argument from nominal reference, which draws on a Quine-like criterion of ontological commitment, are criticized in part II. Against facts argues that metaphysicians should stop worrying about facts, and philosophers in general should stop arguing for or against entities on the basis of how we use language.Less
Against facts argues that we have no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world, at least as they are described by the two major metaphysical theories of facts. Neither of these theories is tenable—neither the theory according to which facts are special structured building blocks of reality nor the theory according to which facts are whatever is named by certain expressions of the form “the fact that such and such.” There is reality, and there are entities in reality that we are able to name, but among these entities there are no facts. Drawing on metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and linguistics, Against facts examines the main arguments in favor of and against facts of the two major sorts, distinguished as compositional and propositional, giving special attention to methodological presuppositions. Compositional facts (facts as special structured building blocks of reality) and the central argument for them, Armstrong’s truthmaker argument are criticized in part I. Propositional facts (facts as whatever is named in “the fact that” statements) and what Against facts calls the argument from nominal reference, which draws on a Quine-like criterion of ontological commitment, are criticized in part II. Against facts argues that metaphysicians should stop worrying about facts, and philosophers in general should stop arguing for or against entities on the basis of how we use language.
Bernhard Nickel
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199640003
- eISBN:
- 9780191822049
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199640003.003.0009
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Language, Metaphysics/Epistemology
A brief summary of the book and an indication for directions opened up by the theory presented.
A brief summary of the book and an indication for directions opened up by the theory presented.
Lee Walters and John Hawthorne (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780198712732
- eISBN:
- 9780191781070
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198712732.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Logic/Philosophy of Mathematics, Philosophy of Language
This is a volume of essays in philosophy and linguistics in tribute to Dorothy Edgington, the first woman to hold a chair in philosophy in the University of Oxford. The volume focuses on topics to ...
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This is a volume of essays in philosophy and linguistics in tribute to Dorothy Edgington, the first woman to hold a chair in philosophy in the University of Oxford. The volume focuses on topics to which Edgington has made many important contributions including conditionals, vagueness, the paradox of knowability, and probability. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, linguists, and psychologists with an interest in philosophical logic, natural language semantics, and reasoning.Less
This is a volume of essays in philosophy and linguistics in tribute to Dorothy Edgington, the first woman to hold a chair in philosophy in the University of Oxford. The volume focuses on topics to which Edgington has made many important contributions including conditionals, vagueness, the paradox of knowability, and probability. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, linguists, and psychologists with an interest in philosophical logic, natural language semantics, and reasoning.