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If we don't need ordinary objects in our causal explanations, it is often held, Occam's razor enjoins us to eliminate them. This chapter examines these arguments from parsimony, suggesting first that Occam's razor does not generalize to cases in which there are analytic entailments between existence claims. Moreover, it is argued that eliminativists, such as van Inwagen and Merricks who seek to paraphrase claims, for example, about baseballs in terms of claims about atoms arranged baseballwise, don't really offer a more parsimonious theory, since their paraphrased claims may be pleonastically transformed into claims that are explicitly committed to ordinary objects. This provides the basis for an argument for the existence of ordinary objects, and against Quine's criterion of ontological commitment. In closing, this chapter considers whether this also entails commitment to extraordinary objects, and whether more severe forms of eliminativism can do better.

This chapter examines the view that we do not exist because there are no human thinkers: nihilism. Nihilism is defended against the charge that it is an absurd denial of the obvious, or that it is self‐refuting. Attempts by Kant and others, such as Russell, Unger, and Wittgenstein, to defeat nihilism by showing that thought requires a thinker are examined and found wanting. Attention then turns to attempts to paraphrase statements apparently about people into terms compatible with nihilism. Although this is difficult because nihilists will want to deny the existence of any composite objects, no conclusive objections to the project are found. It is then argued that nihilism, like solipsism, is depressing, and that someone who accepted it consistently would appear to deprive herself of any reasons for action.

Since the earliest days of generative grammar, there has existed a strong tendency to consider one construction in relation to a particular rough paraphrase. Initially, this was a result of the emphasis on transformations that derived one pattern from another. While today there exist many non-derivational theories for which this motivation no longer exists, the traditional outlook has not completely lost its grip, as can be seen from continuing focus on partial or incomplete generalizations such as the ‘dative’ construction or the ‘locative’ alternation. This chapter argues that it is profitable to look beyond alternations: to consider each surface pattern on its own terms. It is observed that when considering instances of the same surface pattern involving different words, similarities should be attributed to the surface pattern and differences to the different verbs and arguments involved. A derivational proposal is critiqued in order to demonstrate that what appear to be arguments in favour of derivations are often in fact arguments in favour of attention to surface structure instead.

Contains 15 hymns from the period of the Evangelical Revival, featuring writers such as Toplady, Newton, Cowper, and Smart. It also features two great Welsh hymns from the period, and three paraphrases from the Scottish metrical psalm and paraphrase book of 1781.

This chapter discusses Victorinus’ commentary on Galatians in terms of its exegetical techniques and genre. These aspect of his work on Galatians are compared with both Christian and non-Christian commentaries of the third and fourth centuries. His use of prefaces and exegetical techniques, such as paraphrase (including his appropriation of the apostle Paul’s first-person) are examined. Victorinus’ hermeneutical vocabulary provides a key for understanding what he intends by the manner of commentary he denominated commentatio simplex, which is can only somewhat misleadingly be called ‘literal’. Victorinus’ commentaries on Paul with their philosophical excurses have affinities with non-Christian philosophical eisagogic commentaries in their attempt to establish a basic platform as prerequisite for deeper philosophical or theological understanding.

This chapter discusses the practice of rewriting found in Wyatt’s paraphrases of the seven penitential psalms. Wyatt’s paraphrases frustrate correspondences between poet and speaker, and show a concern—in both theme and material condition—with verbal redemption. Within the sequence, phonocentric pleas for forgiveness are answered by chirographic acts of correction. Redemption of the penitent sinner is inseparable from redemption of a fallen lexis: words and speakers pursue an elusive, grammatological state of grace. Wyatt’s Davidic speaker, wrestling like Luther with the keywords ‘justice’ and ‘mercy’, is engaged in a process of approximating his words to the Word (Logos). This chapter appraises Wyatt’s departures from his sources (principally Aretino’s rendition of the psalms with accompanying prologues), and examines the bibliographic devices by which verbal redemption can be traced in Wyatt’s handling. Particular consideration is paid to Wyatt’s rescriptive interlineations in his holograph copy of the text in the Egerton Manuscript.

This chapter criticizes what the chapter calls the ‘bold thesis’, which is the conjunction of the idea that films can make an original contribution to philosophy, and the idea that this contribution can be achieved primarily or even entirely through means exclusive to the cinematic medium. A dilemma argument against this thesis is set forth: either support for the bold thesis depends on a claim about a cinematic contribution that cannot be paraphrased and so can be reasonably doubted, or it rests on a contribution that can be paraphrased, in which case the clause about medium specificity is betrayed. As an alternative to the bold thesis, the chapter advocates a moderate thesis whereby a film-related contribution to philosophy can be of value even when the philosophical content is neither original nor conveyed primarily by means exclusive to the cinematic medium. This chapter discusses Aaron Smuts' proposed solution to the problem of paraphrase, which makes reference to an argument advanced by Sergei Eisenstein in the ‘For God and Country’ sequence of October.

Chapter Extract: Early Modern Europe saw a rapidly increasing interest in and an unprecedented pursuit of the sensus literalis of the Hebrew Bible. His exile in Europe, due to his translation of the New Testament that so angered Thomas More, exposed Tyndale to this revival of interest. His importance to this study is the extent to which his English translation found its way into the Authorized Version, bequeathing us a truly idiomatic vernacular Bible. The Authorized Version itself, by contrast, owes everything to the Hebrew text. Careful comparison with Tyndale' translation reveals a return from occasional paraphrase to a rendering that is as literal as can be. In Genesis 3:16, for example, we see a return to the Hebrew allusion to the woman' desire for her husband. Where Tyndale gives us an English Bible, the Authorised Version translators' offering is a Hebrew Bible — in English.

This chapter has three aims: (i) to offer a comprehensive and transparent tripartite classification of philosophical accounts of metaphor; (ii) to consider three truths about metaphor which cannot be jointly accommodated by familiar accounts in this classification, for example, those of Black, Searle and Davidson; (iii) to carve out a space for a further account which fits the classificatory scheme but which does accommodate these features of metaphor. The truths concern: the aptness of metaphor for assertion and truth, the inappropriateness of paraphrase of metaphor, and what is called the transparency of the understanding of metaphor. There is a brief description of the view offered in subsequent chapters, suggesting that it fills a void left by other accounts.

This chapter refutes the two possible arguments for Quine’s criterion for what a discourse is committed to: (1) the triviality thesis, that “there is” as used in ordinary language indicates ontological commitment, and this idiom is straightforwardly regimented by the objectual existential quantifier, (2) that the semantics of objectual quantification presupposes ontological commitment. Seven strategies for supporting the triviality thesis are reviewed, including paraphrase in ordinary language and the pretense program.

In the sixteenth century, the word ‘paraphrase’ came into English to describe texts that ‘expounded’ their sources and were therefore not really translations. But the distinction collapsed as ‘paraphrase’ was at once adopted to describe translations too: ‘paraphrase’ meant both ‘translation’ and ‘not‐translation’. I trace this ambivalence from the mid‐sixteenth century up to Dryden, discussing Erasmus's paraphrases together with poem‐translations by Abraham Fraunce, Thomas Middleton, George Sandys, Obadiah Walker, Richard Baker, Matthew Stevenson and others.

In his Preface to Ovid's Epistles, Dryden advocates translation‐as‐paraphrase, in which the ‘sense’ is allowed to ‘amplified’ but not ‘altered’—though he admits that, in the translations themselves, he has ‘transgressed’ these ‘rules.’ I show that, in his version of Ovid's ‘Canace to Macareus’, Dryden's transgressions as a translator echo Canace's sexual transgression with her brother even while apparently holding it up for disapproval: this creates an intensely conflicted poetry of translation. Other contributors to the same volume adopt related practices of ‘opening’, due in part to the cultural circumstances in which they were working. I discuss in particular Aphra Behn's polemical expansions of ‘Oenone to Paris’.

Translation theorists typically emphasize the differences between translations and their sources. Yet they cannot help letting the idea that there is something identical between the two creep back into their discussions. This happens especially in discussions of poetry, where notions of functional equivalence cannot govern the definition of translation (I discuss the work of J. C. Catford and the ‘Skopos’ school of translation theory as I make this argument). The same pattern recurs in everyday usage: we all know that a translation of Proust is not really Proust; we all slip into saying ‘oh yes I have read Proust’ when all we have really read is a translation. This paradox, I suggest, is what defines translation: a translation is a text that is taken to be different from another and also taken to be the same. A scene from Brian Friel's Translations illustrates the claim.

This concluding chapter revisits and reassesses issues raised by the best of modern criticism, as mapped out in the short introduction to this book. It also discusses such questions as the aptness of the term ‘paraphrase’, and its implications for the understanding of these ambitious poems; the relative importance in these poets of narrative and speeches; the presentation of Christ, whether as God, hero, or teacher; and the nature of their relation to Vergil's Aeneid and epic in general.

Set in larger, persisting communicative situations, rhetorical discourse often features language attributed to other speakers and texts. Speaking for others was especially important in ancient forensic settings where witness testimony was reported secondhand. The methods described in this chapter for incorporating language from other sources follow those in Leech and Short's Style in Fiction. Other voices can be quoted directly, though always with selection and often with stylization, or they can be quoted indirectly. Indirect quotation invites paraphrase that can wander tendentiously from the original wording, and, as it appears in written texts, indirect quotations often include zones of ambiguous attribution. The words or near-words of others can also be abandoned in favor of reporting the speech act achieved by their words. Written texts may be represented using the same options of direct or indirect quotation, or the reporting of speech acts, each of these options increasing the interpretive control of another text. Speakers, of course, without the benefit of quotation marks, have to rely more on vocal dynamics to mark off another's words. The rhetorical manuals favored the dramatic mimicking of other voices (prosopopoeia), going so far as to recommend that the absent, the dead, and even inanimate entities be given a voice in a speech. Bakhtin noted the extremes of language mixtures as the heteroglossia that can result from the often unattributed incorporation of others’ language, even to the point of the double voicing of a single word. In a new media age of IM and blogs, such multivoicing has in fact become routine.

Ontological nihilism is the radical-sounding thesis that there is nothing at all. This chapter first discusses how the most plausible forms of this thesis aim to be slightly less radical than they sound and what they will have to do in order to succeed in their less radical ambitions. In particular, they will have to paraphrase sentences of best science into ontologically innocent counterparts. The chapter then points out the defects in two less plausible strategies, before going on to argue that strategies that look more promising, including one based on Quine's predicate-functor language, face the same defects.

The most important verse paraphrase of the Imitation of Christ in 17th-century France was written by the dramatist Pierre Corneille. In his paratexts he discusses the difficulties he has encountered in the project, which expands on the original by including engravings, many of which illustrate episodes from the lives of saints. One such is Theodora, who is the subject of his closely contemporary martyr tragedy, Théodore. But here too he encountered difficulties, in the context of bienséance, from objections expressed to the prostitution with which the eponym is threatened. In a different idiom, the Jesuit priest Jean-Joseph Surin, seeing his role as exorcist as another kind of imitation of Christ, records his ordeal in two autobiographical works, one of which moves progressively into stylistic incoherence. Finally, Bossuet engages in the polemic surrounding a further possible implication of the term, in the form of the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence.

This chapter examines a commentary on Dem.22, the P.Stras.inv.84, which dates back to the late first century C.E. It looks at the surviving commentary, which is composed of a series of discussions of eight lemmata taken from Dem.22. The first discussion in the papyrus is about the office of the epistateis or the proedroi, and its lemmata may have appeared in the previous column. The other seven lemmata are paraphrased and are discussed in the order that they appear in Demosthenes.