The Limits of Language concerns itself with the nature and limits of language at a time when our understanding of the world and of ourselves is intimately related to what we understand of language. It offers a detailed examination of different approaches to, and claims about, language drawn from the variety of orientations taken toward it, primarily in the twentieth century. What makes the author's approach unique is its concern with the ways in which we may understand language and its relation to the world and ourselves as a question of limits, drawing upon contemporary continental and English-language views of language, philosophical and linguistic, from American pragmatists such as Peirce and Dewey, and from important contemporary sources such as feminist theory. The book bridges English-language and continental discussions of language partly by recognizing their contrasts but systematically developing an overarching view of language out of their interaction. The focus of the book on the limits of language leads from questions concerning a science of language, and how such a science may attempt to demarcate its limits, as in Saussure and Chomsky, to a view of grammar and structure, of rules, in language, again issues of whether there are permanent and far-reaching limits to language and to human linguistic capabilities. In addition, the limits of language mark the limits of humanity and our understanding of the world, as expressed in Wittgenstein and Heidegger, for example, so that exploration of language limits lead to the very limits of nature and experience, of individual and social life. These, as many contemporary writers argue, including Levinas, Lyotard, and Irigaray, are notontological, but are fundamentally ethical and political. In other words, far-reaching explorations in the possibilities of another ethics and politics emerge from the examination of language.

At a time when the metaphysical tradition is being called profoundly into question by proponents of pragmatism and continental philosophy, Inexhaustibility and Human Being examines a specific aspect of metaphysics: the nature of being human, acknowledging the force of these critiques and discussing their ramifications. Exploring the possibility of a systematic metaphysics that acknowledges the limits of every thought, the book offers a metaphysics of human being based on locality and inexhaustibility. Its major focus is on a corresponding "anthropology" in which human being is both local and exhaustive a that is, based on limitation and on the limitation of limitation. Among the bookas major topics are: being as locality and inexhaustibility; human being as judgment and perspective; knowing and reason as query; language and meaning as semasis; emotion; sociality; politics; life and death. Clearly written, and wide-ranging in scope, Inexhaustibility and Human Being covers a multitude of subjects a history, love, sexuality, consciousness, suffering, the body, instrumentality, government, and law a in the development of its thesis. The book will appeal not only to philosophers a but also to those involved in studying the various arenas of human activity Professor Ross examines.

This work completes Ross's trilogy examining the inexhaustible complexity of the world and our relation to our surroundings. The philosophical viewpoint Ross examines in Locality and Practical Judgment is related to the American naturalist and pragmatist traditions and to the views of many twentieth-century European philosophers. It bears affinities with historicism and existentialism, insofar as both emphasize aspects of human finiteness. What is new is the systematic development of locality in application to practical experience. Ross applies locality not only to finite beings but also to their conditions and limitations - even the limits have limits; even the conditions are conditioned. The consequence of the doubly reflexive locality is inexhaustibility where inexhaustibility is equivalent to multiple locality.