Rudolf Carnap's entire theory of Language structure "came to me," he reports, "like a vision during a sleepless night in January 1931, when I was ill." This theory appeared in The Logical Syntax of Language (1934). Carnap argued that many philosophical controversies really depend upon whether a particular language form should be used. This leads him to his famous "Principle of tolerance" by which everyone is free to mix and match the rules of his language and therefore his logic in any way he wishes. In this way, philosophical issues become reduced to a discussion of syntactical properties, plus reasons of practical convenience for preferring one form of language to another. In a tour de force of precise reasoning, Carnap also indicated how two model languages could be constructed. This is one of three books which Open Court is making available in paperback reprint in its Open Court Classics series. The other two are Carnap's The Logical Structure of the World and Schlick's General Theory of Knowledge.

Proceedings of the von Wright conference at the Center for Intedisciplinary Studies in Bielefeld, April 26 to 27, 1996. Georg Henrik von Wright, born 1916, is an important analytical philosopher of the 20th century.

This book, first published in 1987, investigates what distinguishes the part of human behaviour that is action (praxis) from the part that is not. The distinction was clearly drawn by Socrates, and developed by Aristotle and the medievals, but key elements of their work became obscured in modern philosophy, and were not fully recovered when, under Wittgenstein's influence, the theory of action was revived in analytical philosophy. This study aims to recover those elements, and to analyse them in terms of a defensible semantics on Fregean lines. Among its conclusions: that actions are bodily or mental events that are causally explained by their doers' propositional attitudes, especially by their choices or fully specific intentions; that choice cannot be reduced to desire and belief, and hence that the traditional concept of will as intellectual appetite must be revived.

This book assesses the respective prospects of two competing methodological approaches to the study of meaning and communication, as well truth and inference, each figuring prominently within the analytic tradition of philosophy of language. The first, 'logistical' approach is characterized by the employment of de-compositional logical analysis designed to resolve various theoretically problematic semantic and logical puzzles. The representative proponents of this approach are the three great early analytic philosophers (Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein). The second, 'phenomenological' approach, by contrast, instead advocates careful inspection and detailed description of our actual linguistic practices, along with general features of the ordinary circumstances, and lived experiences, in which they are situated. The aim of such description is then to dissolve the aforementioned puzzles by showing them to derive from key misunderstandings of these practices and circumstances. The principle proponent here is the later Wittgenstein. Expanding upon the work of the later Wittgenstein, this book argues that considerations regarding the nature of following a rule, and deriving from the impossibility of private languages, decisively recommend the phenomenological over the logistical methodology, in particular because these considerations demand that we identify linguistic meanings with the disciplined uses of words within public, and proto-typically social, linguistic practices.

We have entered a new era of nature. What remains of the frontiers of modern thought that divided the living from the inert, subjectivity from objectivity, the apparent from the real, value from fact, and the human from the nonhuman? Can the great oppositions that presided over the modern invention of nature still claim any cogency? In Nature as Event, Didier Debaise shows how new narratives and cosmologies are necessary to rearticulate that which until now had been separated. Following William James and Alfred North Whitehead, Debaise presents a pluralistic approach to nature. What would happen if we attributed subjectivity and potential to all beings, human and nonhuman? Why should we not consider aesthetics and affect as the fabric that binds all existence? And what if the senses of importance and value were no longer understood to be exclusively limited to the human?

This book offers a unique interpretation of tragic literature in the Western tradition, deploying the method and style of Analytic philosophy. Richard Gaskin argues that tragic literature seeks to offer moral and linguistic redress (compensation) for suffering. Moral redress involves the balancing of a protagonist's suffering with guilt (and vice versa): Gaskin contends that, to a much greater extent than has been recognized by recent critics, traditional tragedy represents suffering as incurred by avoidable and culpable mistakes of a cognitive nature. Moral redress operates in the first instance at the level of the individual agent. Linguistic redress, by contrast, operates at a higher level of generality, namely at the level of the community: its fundamental motor is the sheer expressibility of suffering in words. Against many writers on tragedy, Gaskin argues that language is competent to express pain and suffering, and that tragic literature has that expression as one its principal purposes. The definition of tragic literature in this book is expanded to include more than stage drama: the treatment stretches from the Classical and Medieval periods through to the early twentieth century. There is a special focus on Sophocles, but Gaskin takes account of most other major tragic authors in the European tradition, including Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, Seneca, Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Buchner, Ibsen, Hardy, Kafka, and Mann; lesser-known areas, such as Renaissance neo-Latin tragedy, are also covered. Among theorists of tragedy, Gaskin concentrates on Aristotle and Bradley; but the contributions of numerous contemporary commentators are also assessed. Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: A Philosophical Perspective offers a new and genuinely interdisciplinary perspective on tragedy that will be of considerable interest both to philosophers of literature and to literary critics.

In late nineteenth-century German academic circles, the term verstehen (literally, understanding, or comprehension) came to be associated with the view that social phenomena must be understood from the point of view of the social actor. Advocates of this approach were opposed by positivists who stressed the unity of method between the social and natural sciences and an external, experimental, and quantitative knowledge. Although modified over time, the dispute between positivists and antipositivists--nowadays called naturalists and antinaturalists--has persisted and still defines many debates in the field of philosophy of social sciences. In this volume, Michael Martin offers a critical appraisal of verstehen as a method of verification and discovery as well as a necessary condition for understanding. In its strongest forms, verstehen entails subjectively reliving the experience of the social actor or at least rethinking his or her thoughts, while in its weaker forms it only involves reconstructing the rationale for acting. Martin's opening chapter offers a reconsideration of the debate between the classical verstehen theorists--Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Weber, R.G. Collingwood--and the positivists. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with positivist critiques of verstehen as a method of social scientific verification and understanding. In the subsequent chapters Martin considers contemporary varieties of the verstehen position and argues that they like the classical positions, they conflict with the pluralistic nature of social science. Chapter 4 discusses Peter Winch's and William Dray's variants of verstehen, while chapters 5 through 9 consider recent theorists--Karl Popper, Charles Taylor, Clifford Geertz--whose work can be characterized in verstehenist terms: In his conclusion Martin defines the limitations of the classical and recent verstehen positions and proposes a methodological pluralism in which verstehen is justified pragmatically in terms of the purposes and contexts of inquiry. This volume is the only comprehensive and sustained critique of verstehen theory currently available. It will be of interest to sociologists, philosophers, political scientists, and anthropologists.

This book is the first part of a comprehensive study of Wittgenstein's conception of language description. Describing language was no pastime occupation for the philosopher. It was hard work and it meant struggle. It made for a philosophy that required Wittgenstein's full attention and half his life. His approach had always been working on himself, on how he saw things. The central claim of this book is that nothing will come of our exegetical efforts to see what Wittgenstein's later philosophy amounts to if his work on describing language is not given the place and concern it deserves. The book shows what his philosophy might begin to look like in the light of critical questions around his interest to see the end of the day with descriptions, and these things only.

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the birth of two distinct philosophical schools in Europe: analytic philosophy and phenomenology. The history of 20th-century philosophy is often written as an account of the development of one or both of these schools, as well as their overt or covert mutual hostility. What is often left out of this history, however, is the relationship between the two European schools and a third significant philosophical event: the birth and development of pragmatism, the indigenous philosophical movement of the United States. Through a careful analysis of seminal figures and central texts, this book explores the mutual intellectual influences, convergences, and differences between these three revolutionary philosophical traditions. The essays in this volume aim to show the central role that pragmatism played in the development of philosophical thought at the turn of the twentieth century, widen our understanding of a seminal point in the history of philosophy, and shed light on the ways in which these three schools of thought continue to shape the theoretical agenda of contemporary philosophy.

This exciting and innovative book fills a gap in the growing area of discourse analysis within the social sciences. It provides the analytical tools with which students and their teachers can understand the complex and often conflicting discourses across a range of social science disciplines.Examining the theories of Foucault, Koselleck, Laclau and Luhmann, the book: - vbTab]focuses on the political and social aspects of their writing;- vbTab]discusses and combines their theories to suggest new analytical strategies for understanding society;- vbTab]combines theory with practical illustrations.A best seller in Denmark, this English edition is vital reading for anyone with an interest in discourse analysis. It will also be invaluable to anyone looking at the analytical works of Foucault, Koselleck, Laclau and Luhmann. Students will find the clear exposition of the theories and strategies supported by an easy-to-digest, easy-to-read layout, which includes summaries and boxed examples highlighting the relevance of analytical strategies to social and policy research.

Justice as Right Actions presents an original theory of justice anchored in the analytical philosophical tradition. In contrast to many contemporary approaches, the theory provides normative guidance, rather than focusing solely on political structures and institutions, as the question of justice is seen to comprise both a moral inquiry concerned with questions of good and bad, right and wrong, and a political inquiry, concerned with the nature of the polity and how individuals relate to it. Presenting a relational account of justice, rather than a distributive account - the latter, so much more prevalent in current studies - communications are seen as the key to the theory, both in the substantive sense as a discursive method of resolving disputes, as well as instrumentally, in the transmission of concepts, especially values through time. Rule-oriented in approach, justice as right actions attempts to be value-neutral, acknowledging, however, an underlying thin theory of the good, including concepts of rationality, autonomous moral agency, equal concern and respect for others, as well as plurality of values. Its political context is liberalism, with components of negative liberty and equality of concern and respect, while underscoring as well, the concepts of tolerance and social diversity. In this study, the original theory of Justice as Right Actions is also contrasted with and situated among contemporary accounts of justice, including the most important theoretical works on the topic in the past half-century. Thus, the study also serves as a valuable review and critique of such major contemporary accounts of justice.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1952.

Bertrand Russell and the Nature of Propositions offers the first book-length defence of the Multiple Relation Theory of Judgement (MRTJ). Although the theory was much maligned by Wittgenstein and ultimately rejected by Russell himself, Lebens shows that it provides a rich and insightful way to understand the nature of propositional content. In Part I, Lebens charts the trajectory of Russell's thought before he adopted the MRTJ. Part II reviews the historical story of the theory: What led Russell to deny the existence of propositions altogether? Why did the theory keep evolving throughout its short life? What role did G. F. Stout play in the evolution of the theory? What was Wittgenstein's concern with the theory, and, if we can't know what his concern was exactly, then what are the best contending hypotheses? And why did Russell give the theory up? In Part III, Lebens makes the case that Russell's concerns with the theory weren't worth its rejection. Moreover, he argues that the MRTJ does most of what we could want from an account of propositions at little philosophical cost. This book bridges the history of early analytic philosophy with work in contemporary philosophy of language. It advances a bold reading of the theory of descriptions and offers a new understanding of the role of Stout and the representation concern in the evolution of the MRTJ. It also makes a decisive contribution to philosophy of language by demonstrating the viability of a no-proposition theory of propositions.

This book explores in detail the relation between ontology and ethics in the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, notably the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" and, to a lesser extent, the "Notebooks 1914-1916." Self-contained and requiring no prior knowledge of Wittgenstein's thought, it is the first book-length argument that his views on ethics decisively shaped his ontological and semantic thought.
The book's main thesis is twofold. It argues that the ontological theory of the "Tractatus" is fundamentally dependent on its logical and linguistic doctrines: the tractarian world is the world as it appears in language and thought. It also maintains that this interpretation of the ontology of the "Tractatus" can be argued for not only on systematic grounds, but also via the contents of the ethical theory that it offers. Wittgenstein's views on ethics presuppose that language and thought are but one way in which we interact with reality.
Although detailed studies of Wittgenstein's ontology and ethics exist, this book is the first thorough investigation of the relationship between them. As an introduction to Wittgenstein, it sheds new light on an important aspect of his early thought.

What is philosophy about and what are its methods? Philosophy and Ordinary Language is a defence of the view that philosophy is largely about questions of language, which to a large extent means ordinary language. Some people argue that if philosophy is about ordinary language, then it is necessarily less deep and difficult than it is usually taken to be but Oswald Hanfling shows us that this isn't true. Hanfling, a leading expert in the development of analytic philosophy, covers a wide range of topics, including scepticism and the definition of knowledge, free will, empiricism, folk psychology, ordinary versus artificial logic, and philosophy versus science. Drawing on philosophers such as Austin, Wittgenstein, and Quine, this book explores the nature of ordinary language in philosophy.

In this collection of essays Samuel Wheeler discusses Derrida and other "deconstructive" thinkers from the perspective of an analytic philosopher willing to treat deconstruction as philosophy, taking it seriously enough to look for and analyze its arguments. The essays focus on the theory of meaning, truth, interpretation, metaphor, and the relationship of language to the world. Wheeler links the thought of Derrida to that of Davidson and argues for close affinities among Derrida, Quine, de Man, and Wittgenstein. He also demonstrates the propinquity of Plato and Derrida and shows that New Criticism shares deconstruction's conception of language. Of the twelve essays in the collection, four are published here for the first time.
The fundamental resemblance between Derrida and such analytic thinkers as Quine, Wittgenstein, and Davidson, the author argues, is that they deny the possibility of meanings as self-interpreting media constituting thoughts and intentions. Derrida argues that some form of magic language has determined the very project of philosophy, and his arguments work out the consequences of denying that there are such self-interpreting mental contents. In addition, Derrida and Davidson agree in denying any "given." Without a given, questions about realism and idealism cease to have a point. Derrida and Davidson are both committed to the textuality of all significant marks, whether in neurons or on paper. They argue that there is no mode of representation more direct than language.

What is judgement?

This question has exercised generations of philosophers. Early analytic philosophers such as Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein as well as phenomenologists such as Brentano, Husserl and Reinach changed how philosophers think about this question. The papers in this book explore and assess their contributions and help us to retrace their steps. In doing so we will get a clearer picture of judgement and the related notion of truth.

This forward-thinking collection presents new work that looks beyond the division between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions-one that has long caused dissension, mutual distrust, and institutional barriers to the development of common concerns and problems. Rather than rehearsing the causes of the divide, contributors draw upon the problems, methods, and results of both traditions to show what post-divide philosophical work looks like in practice. Ranging from metaphysics and philosophy of mind to political philosophy and ethics, the papers gathered here bring into mutual dialogue a wide range of recent and contemporary thinkers, and confront leading problems common to both traditions, including methodology, ontology, meaning, truth, values, and personhood. Collectively, these essays show that it is already possible to foresee a future for philosophical thought and practice no longer determined neither as "analytic" nor as "continental," but, instead, as a pluralistic synthesis of what is best in both traditions. The new work assembled here shows how the problems, projects, and ambitions of twentieth-century philosophy are already being taken up and productively transformed to produce new insights, questions, and methods for philosophy today.

The Third City, first published in 1982, offers an innovative response to the troubled relationship between Western philosophy, as it has been conducted since the Renaissance, and the everyday lives of the communities in which we live. Bebek contends that the model of philosophical reflection is to be found in Plato's dialogues, which, rather than simply describing utopia through a series of abstract 'concepts', were instead designed to impel the learner towards a recognition of the true nature of reality - as much a 'self-recognition' as an understanding of the world 'out there'. Thus, in order to revive the spirit of true philosophy, it is necessary to avoid both the false extremes of idealism and materialism, and to allow ethics once more to merge with epistemology. This title presents an exposition of this ethically based philosophy, allowing the very human insights of Plato to illumine the diverse problems of today.

Taking a multidisciplinary approach this addresses the academic and practical issues concerning the present and future of the built environment, arguing for its enlightened management in the future of our present-day environment.

Based on original translations of passages from the works of three major thinkers of the classical Indian school of Advaita (Sankara, Vacaspati and Sri Harsa), but addressing issues found in Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein and contemporary analytic philosophers, this book argues for a philosophical position it calls 'non-realism'. This is the view that an independent, external world must be assumed if the features of cognition are to be explained, but that it cannot be proved that there is such a world, independently of an appeal to cognition itself. This position is constructed against idealist denials of externality, realist arguments for an independent world and the sceptical denial of the coherence of cognition.

In Vagueness and Degrees of Truth, Nicholas Smith develops a new theory of vagueness: fuzzy plurivaluationism. A predicate is said to be vague if there is no sharply defined boundary between the things to which it applies and the things to which it does not apply. For example, 'heavy' is vague in a way that 'weighs over 20 kilograms' is not. A great many predicates - both in everyday talk, and in a wide array of theoretical vocabularies, from law to psychology to engineering - are vague. Smith argues, on the basis of a detailed account of the defining features of vagueness, that an accurate theory of vagueness must involve the idea that truth comes in degrees. The core idea of degrees of truth is that while some sentences are true and some are false, others possess intermediate truth values: they are truer than the false sentences, but not as true as the true ones. Degree-theoretic treatments of vagueness have been proposed in the past, but all have encountered significant objections. In light of these, Smith develops a new type of degree theory. Its innovations include a definition of logical consequence that allows the derivation of a classical consequence relation from the degree-theoretic semantics, a unified account of degrees of truth and subjective probabilities, and the incorporation of semantic indeterminacy - the view that vague statements need not have unique meanings - into the degree-theoretic framework. As well as being essential reading for those working on vagueness, Smith's book provides an excellent entry-point for newcomers to the era - both from elsewhere in philosophy, and from computer science, logic and engineering. It contains a thorough introduction to existing theories of vagueness and to the requisite logical background.

This popular selection of Wittgenstein's key writings has now been updated to include new material relevant to recent debates about the philosopher.
Follows the evolution of Wittgenstein's philosophical thought from the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" through to the "Philosophical Investigations."
Excerpts are arranged by topic and introduce readers to all the central concerns of Wittgenstein's philosophy.
Now includes a new chapter on 'Sense, Nonsense and Philosophy' incorporating material relevant to recent debates about Wittgenstein.

This book collects 13 papers that explore Wittgenstein's philosophy throughout the different stages of his career. The author writes from the viewpoint of critical rationalism. The tone of his analysis is friendly and appreciative yet critical. Of these papers, seven are on the background to the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Five papers examine different aspects of it: one on the philosophy of young Wittgenstein, one on his transitional period, and the final three on the philosophy of mature Wittgenstein, chiefly his Philosophical Investigations. The last of these papers, which serves as the concluding chapter, concerns the analytical school of philosophy that grew chiefly under its influence. Wittgenstein's posthumous Philosophical Investigations ignores formal languages while retaining the view of metaphysics as meaningless -- declaring that all languages are metaphysics-free. It was very popular in the middle of the twentieth century. Now it is passe. Wittgenstein had hoped to dissolve all philosophical disputes, yet he generated a new kind of dispute. His claim to have improved the philosophy of life is awkward just because he prevented philosophical discussion from the ability to achieve that: he cut the branch on which he was sitting. This, according to the author, is the most serious critique of Wittgenstein.