Search Results

This book is a concise and readable study of five intertwined themes at the heart of Wittgenstein's thought, written by one of his most eminent interpreters. It offers penetrating investigations and lucid explications of some of the most influential and yet puzzling writings of twentieth-century philosophy. It focuses on the idea of language as a picture of the world; the phenomenon of linguistic regularity; the famous ‘private language argument’; logical necessity; and ego and the self.

This book is a compendium of writings from the last ten years by one of the leading figures in aesthetics, Jerrold Levinson. It contains twenty-four essays and is divided into seven parts. The first is about issues relating to art in general, not specific to one art form. The second is about philosophical problems specific to music. The third part focuses on pictorial art, and the fourth on interpretation, in particular, the interpretation of literature. The remaining parts of the book discuss aesthetic properties, issues in historical aesthetics, humor, and intrinsic value.

The book develops a comprehensive framework for doing philosophy of time. It brings together a variety of different perspectives, linking the ordinary conception of time with the physicist’s conception, and linking questions about time addressed in metaphysics with questions addressed in the philosophy of language. Within this framework, the book explores the temporal dimension of the material world in relation to the temporal dimension of our ordinary discourse about the world. The discussion is centred around the dispute between three-dimensionalists and four-dimensionalists about whether the temporal profile of ordinary objects mirrors their spatial profile. Are ordinary objects extended in time in the same way in which they are extended in space? Do they have temporal as well as spatial parts? Four-dimensionalists say ‘yes’, three-dimensionalists say ‘no’. The book develops an original three-dimensionalist picture of the material world, and argues that this picture is preferable to its four-dimensionalists rivals if ordinary thought and talk are taken seriously. Among the issues discussed are the metaphysics of persistence, change, composition, location, coincidence, and relativity; the ontology of past, present, and future; and the semantics of predication, tense, temporal modifiers, and sortal terms.

This book argues that Augustine's Confessions may fruitfully be read as a series of encounters with language and signs: as a baby learning to speak, as a schoolboy orator, student, professor of rhetoric, and Christian exegete. While language is a universal human characteristic, the fact of languages tends to divide humans into arbitrary and uncomprehending communities; and even in individual communities, language can be manipulated or simply misunderstood. On the theological level, Augustine faces question of how to describe (and invoke) an absolute and immutable God in language that is necessary arbitrary and mutable. This book seeks to explore these questions through a close analysis of specific linguistic features of the work, such as his use of the language of Roman comedy, his attitudes towards Greek, or his use of biblical Latin. Consideration is given also to such ‘paralinguistic’ activities as singing or laughing, and to the relationship between the spoken and the written word.

Discussions of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus are currently dominated by two opposing interpretations of the work: a metaphysical or realist reading and the ‘resolute’ reading of Cora Diamond and James Conant. This book aims to develop an alternative interpretative line, which rejects the idea central to the metaphysical reading that Wittgenstein sets out to ground the logic of our language in features of an independently constituted reality, but which allows that he aims to provide positive philosophical insights into how language functions. It takes as a guiding principle the idea that we should see Wittgenstein’s early work as an attempt to eschew philosophical theory and to allow language itself to reveal how it functions. By this account, the aim of the work is to elucidate what language itself makes clear, namely, what is essential to its capacity to express thoughts that are true or false. The anti-metaphysical interpretation presented includes a novel reading of the problematic opening sections of the Tractatus, in which the apparently metaphysical status of Wittgenstein’s remarks is shown to be an illusion. The book includes a discussion of the philosophical background to the Tractatus, a comprehensive interpretation of Wittgenstein’s early views of logic and language, and an interpretation of the remarks on solipsism. The final chapter is a discussion of the relation between the early and the later philosophy that articulates the fundamental shift in Wittgenstein’s approach to the task of understanding how language functions and reveal the still more fundamental continuity in his conception of his philosophical task.

John McDowell’s attempt to revive the doctrine of empiricism in a ‘minimal’ or ‘transcendental’ form is seriously undermined by inadequacies in the way he conceives what he styles the ‘order of justification’ connecting world, experience, and judgement. For example, his conception of the roles played by causation and nature in this order is threatened with vacuity. The requirements of self-consciousness and verbal articulacy which he places on subjects participating in the justificatory relation between experience and judgement are unwarranted, and have the implausible consequence that infants and non-human animals are excluded from the ‘order of justification’, and thus deprived of experience of the world. Above all, McDowell’s position is vitiated by a substantial error he commits in the philosophy of language: following ancient tradition rather than Frege’s radical departure from that tradition, he locates concepts at the level of sense rather than at the level of reference in the semantical hierarchy. This error generates an unwanted Kantian transcendental idealism which in effect delivers a reductio ad absurdum of McDowell’s metaphysical economy. To correct this mistake, Frege must first be followed in his location of concepts at the level of reference. Second, one must move beyond Frege to locate not only concepts but also propositions at that level. This, in turn, requires the serious consideration of an idea which McDowell mentions only to reject, that of objects as speaking to us ‘in the world’s own language’. Despite the correction recommended here, if empiricism is to have any chance of success, it must be still more minimal in its pretensions than McDowell allows. In particular, it must abandon the individualistic and intellectualistic construction which McDowell places on the ‘order of justification’.

The broad aim of this work is to explain how mere noises, marks, gestures, and mental/neural symbols are able to capture the world, that is, how words and sentences (in whatever medium) come to mean what they do, to stand for certain things, to be true or false of reality. Paul Horwich’s answer takes off from Wittgenstein’s appealingly demystifying remark, that the meaning of a term is nothing over and above its use, and proceeds with a groundbreaking articulation and defence of that idea, showing how it can deal successfully with Quinean and Kripkean forms of scepticism about meaning, with the various normative features of thought and language, with the paradoxical phenomenon of vagueness, with the way that word-meanings combine to yield sentence-meanings, and with Chomsky-style models of the language faculty. The main lines of this theory were first suggested in Horwich’s 1998 book, Meaning. The present volume (which requires no familiarity with its predecessor) provides a host of improved, formulations, fresh arguments, responses to criticism, and extensions of the position into new areas.

This book is a study of Wittgenstein’s early masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It argues that Wittgenstein’s aim in that deeply puzzling work is to show that the ‘intelligibility of thought’ and the ‘meaningfulness of language’, which logical truths would delimit, and metaphysics and the philosophy of mind and language would explain are issues constituted by confusions. What is exposed is a mirage of a kind of self-consciousness, a misperception of the ways in which we happen to think, talk, and act as reasons why we ought to think, talk, and act as we do. The root of that misperception is our confusedly endowing words with a life of their own: we enchant and are enchanted by words, colluding in a confusion that transposes on to them and the world which we then see them as ‘fitting’, responsibilities that are actually ours to bear. Such words promise to spare us the trouble not only of thinking, but of living. In presenting this view, the book offers readings of all of the major themes of the Tractatus, including its discussion of logical truth, objects, names, inferential relations, subjectivity, solipsism, and the inexpressible. It offers novel explanations of what is at stake in Wittgenstein’s comparison of propositions with pictures, of why Wittgenstein declared the point of the Tractatus to be ethical, of how a book — which infamously declares itself to be nonsensical— can clarify our thoughts and require of us that we exercise our capacity to reason in reading it, and of how Wittgenstein later came to re-evaluate the achievement of the Tractatus.

This book argues that we live in an age of somatic subjects, whose authentic identity must be represented through the body. When a perceived mismatch between inner self and outer form occurs, technologies can step in to change the flesh. Drawing on Wittgenstein's objections to the idea of a private language, and on Foucault's critical account of normalization, this book shows how we have been led to think of ourselves in this way, and suggests that breaking the hold of this picture of the self will be central to our freedom. How should we work on ourselves when so often the kind of self we are urged to be is itself a product of normalization? This question is answered through three case studies that analyze feminist interpretations of transgender politics, the allure of weight-loss dieting, and representations of cosmetic surgery patients. Mixing philosophical argument with personal narrative and analysis of popular culture, the book moves from engagement with Leslie Feinberg on trans liberation, to an auto-ethnography of Weight Watchers meetings, to a reading of Extreme Makeover, to the author's own practice of yoga. The book draws on philosophy, sociology, medicine, cultural studies, and psychology to suggest that these examples, in different ways, are connected to the picture of the somatic subject. Working on the self can both generate new skills and make us more docile; enhance our pleasures and narrow our possibilities; encourage us to take care of ourselves while increasing our dependence on experts. Self transformation through the body can limit us and liberate us at the same time. To move beyond this paradox, the book concludes by arguing that Foucault's last work on ethics provides untapped resources for understanding how we might use our embodied agency to change ourselves for the better.

The usual division of philosophy into ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ obscures the continuities in philosophy up until 1700. This book examines three areas where these continuities are particularly clear: knowledge, the mind, and language. It does so through three chapters, by different authors, each followed by a detailed response. The first chapter shows how Descartes attacked faculty psychology and thus separated himself from one strand of the medieval tradition, represented by Suárez. At the same time, Descartes was closely following another strand, found in Ockham. Thus, the discontinuity between medieval and modern may not be as sharp as first appears. The second chapter considers discussions of whether knowledge should be kept for the elite. In the Christian world medieval and seventeenth-century thinkers alike rarely advocated esotericism, but Jewish and Muslim scholars such as al-Ghazâlî, Averroes, and Maimonides strongly defended it. The main chapter of Part III argues that a version of such esotericism may be a defensible philosophical position today. The main chapter of Part II shows how Locke's philosophy of language fits into a long medieval tradition of thought based on Aristotle's On Interpretation. Locke introduced the requirement that a word be linked to an idea in the speaker's mind, but the chapter argues that this does not mean that Locke was proposing that we each have a private language.

George Berkeley notoriously claimed that his immaterialist metaphysics was not only consistent with common sense, but that it was also integral to its defense. This book argues that understanding the basic connection between Berkeley's philosophy and common sense requires a better understanding of the four principle components of Berkeley's positive metaphysics: the nature of being, the divine language thesis, the active/passive distinction, and the nature of spirits. This book begins by focusing on Berkeley's view of the nature of being. It elucidates Berkeley's view on Locke and the Cartesians, and examines Berkeley's views about related concepts such as unity and simplicity. From there, it moves on to Berkeley's philosophy of language, arguing that scrutiny of the famous Introduction to the Principles of Human Knowledge reveals that Berkeley identified the ideational theory of meaning and understanding as the root cause of some of the worst of humanity's intellectual errors, not abstract ideas. Abstract ideas are, rather, the most debilitating symptom of this underlying ailment. In place of the ideational theory, Berkeley defends a rudimentary use theory of meaning. This understanding of Berkeley's approach to semantics is then applied to the divine language thesis and is shown to have important consequences for Berkeley's pragmatic approach to the ontology of natural objects and for his approach to our knowledge of, and relation to, other minds, including God's. Turning next to Berkeley's much maligned account of spirits, the book defends the coherence of Berkeley's view of spirits by way of providing an interpretation of the active/passive distinction as marking a normative distinction and by focusing on the role that divine language plays in letting Berkeley identify the soul with the will. With these four principles of Berkeley's philosophy in hand, the book returns to the topic of common sense and offers a defense of Berkeley's philosophy as built upon, and expressive of, the deepest metaphysical commitments of mainstream Christianity.

In a world where natural selection has shaped adaptations of astonishing ingenuity, what is the scope and unique power of rational thinking? This book looks at the twin set of issues surrounding the power of natural selection to mimic rational design, and rational thinking as itself a product of natural selection. While we commonly deem ourselves superior to other species, the logic of natural selection should not lead us to expect that nature does everything for the best. Similarly, rational action does not always promote the best possible outcomes. So what is the difference? Is the pursuit of rationality actually an effective strategy? Part of the answer lies in language, including mathematics and science. Language is the most striking device by which we have made ourselves smarter than our nearest primate cousins. Sometimes the purely instinctual responses we share with other animals put explicit reasoning to shame: the movements of a trained athlete are faster and more accurate than anything she could explicitly calculate. Language, however, with its power to abstract from concrete experience and to range over all aspects of nature, enables breathtakingly precise calculations, which have taken us to the moon and beyond. Most importantly, however, language enables us to formulate an endless multiplicity of values, in potential conflict with one another as well as with instinctual imperatives. This book shows how our rationality and our irrationality are inextricably intertwined. It explores the true ramifications of being human in the natural world.

This book provides a response to the argument for meaning scepticism set out by Saul Kripke in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Kripke asks what makes it the case that anybody ever means anything by any word, and argues that there are no facts of the matter as to what anybody ever means. Kripke's argument has inspired a lively and extended debate in the philosophy of language, as it raises some of the most fundamental issues in the field: namely, the reality, privacy, and normativity of meaning. The book argues that in order to achieve the radical conclusion that there are no facts as to what a person means by a word, the sceptic must rely on the thesis that meaning is normative, and that this thesis fails. Since any ‘sceptical solution’ to the sceptical problem is irremediably incoherent, the book concludes that there must be a fact of the matter about what we mean. In addition to providing an overview of the debate on meaning and content scepticism, this book presents a detailed discussion of the contributions made by Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, Robert Brandom, Fred Dretske, John McDowell, and Crispin Wright, among others, to the controversy surrounding Kripke's argument. The issues considered include the normativity of meaning and its relation to the normativity of moral judgments, reductive and non-reductive theories of meaning, deflationism about truth and meaning, and the privacy of meaning.

Gregory of Nazianzus has long been regarded as the premier teacher on the Holy Trinity in Eastern Christianity. Yet, ironically, for over a century historians and theologians have neglected his work in favor of his fellow Cappadocians Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, while Gregory has long been overshadowed in the West by Augustine. Christopher Beeley's groundbreaking study—the first comprehensive treatment in modern scholarship—examines Gregory's Trinitarian doctrine within the full range of his theological and practical vision. Following an introductory orientation to Gregory's life and theological works, the book traces Gregory's Trinitarian doctrine through a wide range of concerns, from biblical interpretation and language theory to the practicalities of Christian worship, asceticism, and pastoral ministry. It highlights the soteriological nature of Gregory's doctrine, which seamlessly integrates what have more recently been distinguished as dogmatic and ascetical, or doxological and systematic, theology. Unique among modern studies, this book examines Gregory's doctrine across his entire corpus of orations, poems, and letters, giving special attention to its highly rhetorical and contextualized form. It offers new insights in many areas and a major reinterpretation of the famous Theological Orations and Christological epistles (Ep. 101‐102, 202). By comparing Gregory's work with that of his great master, Origen, his Eastern contemporaries, and his Western counterpart, Augustine, the book shows Gregory to be the most outstanding example of the Origenist Trinitarian tradition of fourth‐century Asia Minor. Gregory offered the most powerful and comprehensive Trinitarian doctrine of his age from a distinctively Eastern point of view, largely independent of the work of Athanasius, while also representing the interests of Damasus of Rome and the Italian bishops as the leading pro‐Nicene theologian at the heart of the Eastern empire—a fact which sharply qualifies the long‐accepted dominance of the Athanasian‐Western paradigm as the normative standard for Trinitarian orthodoxy. Long eclipsed in twentieth‐century scholarship, Gregory's doctrine is now brought into full view as the major Greek authority on the Trinity and one of the greatest theologians in the history of the Church.

John Buridan (ca. 1300–1362) has worked out perhaps the most comprehensive account of nominalism in the history of Western thought, the philosophical doctrine according to which the only universals in reality are “names”: the common terms of our language and the common concepts of our minds. But these items are universal only in their signification; they are just as singular entities themselves as are any other items in reality. This book critically examines what is most intriguing to contemporary readers in Buridan’s medieval philosophical system: his nominalist account of the relationships among language, thought, and reality. The main focus of the discussion is Buridan’s deployment of the Ockhamist conception of a “mental language” for mapping the complex structures of written and spoken human languages onto a parsimoniously construed reality. Concerning these linguistic structures themselves, the book carefully analyzes Buridan’s conception of the radical conventionality of written and spoken languages, in contrast to the natural semantic features of concepts. The discussion pays special attention to Buridan’s token-based semantics of terms and propositions, his conception of existential import, ontological commitment, truth, and logical validity. Finally, the book presents a detailed discussion of how these logical devices allow Buridan to maintain his nominalist position without giving up Aristotelian essentialism or yielding to skepticism, always relating the discussion to contemporary concerns with these issues.

These nine chapters, commissioned on the initiative of the Philosophy section of the British Academy, address fundamental questions about time in philosophy, physics, linguistics, and psychology. Are there facts about the future? Could we affect the past? Physics, general relativity and quantum theory give contradictory treatments of time. So in the search for a theory of quantum gravity, which should give way: general relativity or quantum theory? In linguistics and psychology, how does our language represent time, and how do our minds keep track of it?

James Higginbotham's work on tense, aspect, and indexicality discusses the principles governing demonstrative, temporal, and indexical expressions in natural language, and presents new ideas in the semantics of sentence structure. The book brings together his key contributions to the fields, including his recent intervention in the debate on the roles of context and anaphora in reference. The book's chapters are presented in the form in which they were first published, with afterwords where needed, to cover points where the author's thought has developed.