Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics. The scholarly articles assembled in this volume discuss various topics related to languages such as Chamorro, Chuuk, Ewe, Ewondo, Kanuri, Khoekowap, Nauruan, Weskos.

This paper aims to show current philosophical anthropology pertinence to face up the question of meaning of human life. Exploring Marquard’s theory and his comprehension of human being as Homo Compensator‒ which allow to overcome the problems of modernity plunged in the gnosis dilemma, that in the absence of an absolute meaning it fails to understand the problem of evil‒ this paper firstly analyzes how modernity answered that problem from theodicy and philosophy of history. Afterwards, due to the failures (...) of these attempts, Marquard’s compensation proposal will be discussed as a search on a substitute meaning in the context of a philosophy of finitude, which advocates for a rhetorical-narrative meaning. The paper concludes with the problem of the non-compensable and its dilemmas on understanding meaning. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to study scientific observation from a broad perspective, taking into account history, practice and philosophical reflexivity. I shall draw on a series of new approaches variously termed: historical epistemology, history of philosophy of science, science studies, etc. Such approaches were undoubtedly sparked by the difficulties that philosophy of science encountered: if the idea of a neutral language of observation has been abandoned, debate remains as to the character and degree of the (...) theory-ladenness of facts. Two case studies will be considered: observation in the birth of modern science and observation in the life sciences. These will enable us to follow the evolution of the related concepts of accuracy, exactness and precision, as features that render an observation scientific. On closer inspection it appears that these concepts are not given spontaneously; they had to be constructed, and this process was intimately bound up with the development of knowledge. (shrink)

Metaphilosophy, Volume 53, Issue 4, Page 431-445, July 2022.

The hermeneutical tradition represented by Yorck, Heidegger, and Gadamer has distrusted Dilthey as suffering from the two sins of modernism: scientific “positivism” and individualistic and aesthetic “romanticism.” On the one hand, Dilthey’s epistemology is deemed scientistic in accepting the priority of the empirical, the ontic, and consequently scientific inquiry into the physical, biological, and human worlds; on the other hand, his personalist ethos and Goethean humanism, and his pluralistic life- and worldview philosophy are considered excessively aesthetic, culturally liberal, relativistic, and (...) subjective. This essay involves two tasks in response to this negative evaluation of Dilthey that has shaped our current understanding of his philosophical project; first, an interpretation of the issues at stake in Heidegger’s reception of and struggles with Dilthey. These issues touch upon language, historicity, and the nature of hermeneutics. Second, by pursuing this task in light of Guignon’s interpretation of Dilthey and Heidegger, I hope to question and challenge the “overcoming” of Dilthey’s epistemic and life-philosophical hermeneutics in the “ontological” or “philosophical” hermeneutics of Heidegger. (shrink)

'Chatter' cannot always be taken lightly, for its insignificance and insubstantiality challenge the very notions of substance and significance through which rational discourses seek justification. This book shows that in 'chatter' Kierkegaard uncovered a specifically linguistic mode of negativity. The author examines in detail those writings of Kierkegaard in which he undertook complex negotiations with the threat - and also the promise - of 'chatter', which cuts across the distinctions in which the relation of language to reality - and (...) above all, the reality of 'existence' - is stabilized, and it therefore releases historical understanding from its established conventions. Chatter situates as well as takes the measure of the seminal importance of Kierkegaard for many of today's unresolved debates about the relation of language and philosophy to history. (shrink)

Theory and history combine in this book to form a coherent narrative of the debates on language and languages in the Western world, from ancient classic philosophy to the present, with a final glance at on-going discussions on language as a cognitive tool, on its bodily roots and philogenetic role.An introductory chapter reviews the epistemological areas that converge into, or contribute to, language philosophy, and discusses their methods, relations, and goals. In this context, the status of (...) language philosophy is discussed in its relation to the sciences and the arts of language. Each chapter is followed by a list of suggested readings that refer the reader to the final bibliography."About the author" Lia Formigari, Professor Emeritus at University of Rome, La Sapienza. Her publications include: "Language and Experience in XVIIth-century British Philosophy." Amsterdam & Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1988; "Signs, Science and Politics. Philosophies of Language in Europe 1700 1830." Amsterdam & Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1993; "La semiotique empiriste face au kantisme." Liege: Mardaga, 1994. (shrink)

Truth, Language, and History is the much-anticipated final volume of Donald Davidson's philosophical writings. In four groups of essays, Davidson continues to explore the themes that occupied him for more than fifty years: the relations between language and the world; speaker intention and linguistic meaning; language and mind; mind and body; mind and world; mind and other minds. He asks: what is the role of the concept of truth in these explorations? And, can a scientific world (...) view make room for human thought without reducing it to something material and mechanistic? Including a new introduction by his widow, Marcia Cavell, this volume completes Donald Davidson's colossal intellectual legacy. (shrink)

Where is language? Answers to this have attempted to 'incorporate' language in an 'extended mind', through cognition that is 'embodied', 'distributed', 'situated' or 'ecological'. Behind these concepts is a long history that this book is the first to trace. Extending across linguistics, philosophy, psychology and medicine, as well as literary and religious dimensions of the question of what language is, and where it is located, this book challenges mainstream, mind-based accounts of language. Looking at research (...) from the Middle Ages to the present day, and exploring the work of a range of scholars from Aristotle and Galen to Merleau-Ponty and Chomsky, it assesses raging debates about whether mind and language are centred in heart or brain, brain or nervous-muscular system, and whether they are innate or learned, individual or social. This book will appeal to scholars and advanced students in historical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, language evolution and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Although what language users in different cultures say about their own language has long been recognized as of potential interest, its theoretical importance to the study of language has typically been thought to be no more than peripheral. Theorizing Language is the first book to place the reflexive character of language at the very centre both of its empirical study and of its theoretical explanation. Language can only be explained as a cultural product of (...) the reflexive application of its own creative powers to construct, regulate, and give conceptual form to objects of understanding. Language is itself, first and foremost, an object of cultural understanding. Theoretical analyses of language which have neglected its reflexive character, or simply taken its effects for granted, merely impose their own artificial structures on their analytical object. The first part of this book discusses the consequences of neglecting this reflexive character for the technical concepts and methods which are used in analysing different types of communicational phenomena. In the second part, normativity - a crucial aspect of language's reflexive nature - is examined. The book's third and final part focuses on particular issues in the history of linguistic thought which bear witness to the rhetoric of language theorizing as a reflexive form of inquiry. (shrink)

17 essays discussing the role of language in the history of western thought. Since Adam before the Fall named the animals by true insight into their essences, language has never ceased to be the pivot of efforts to understand human nature and our capacity to feel at home in the twin worlds of nature and society. This volume brings together seventeen essays that have appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideasover the last thirty years. (...) Their common theme is the role of language in aspects of the history of western thought from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. The essays cover questions in epistemology, religion, anthropology, lexicography, evolution, the theory of signs, and the origin of language. Contributors: FRANK L. BORCHARDT, MARGRETA DE GRAZIA, SIDONIE CLAUSS, JAN MIEL, THOMAS C.SINGER, VICTOR ANTHONY RUDOWSKI, JULES PAUL SEIGEL, JAMES McLAVERTY, J.R. KNOWLSON, STEPHEN K. LAND, LIA FORMIGARI, H.J. JACKSON, W. JAY REEDY, V.P. BYNACK, CYMBRE QUINCYRAUB, MICHAEL SPRINKER, S. MORRIS ENGEL. (shrink)

Contemporary natural-language semantics began with the assumption that the meaning of a sentence could be modeled by a single truth condition, or by an entity with a truth-condition. But with the recent explosion of dynamic semantics and pragmatics and of work on non- truth-conditional dimensions of linguistic meaning, we are now in the midst of a shift away from a truth-condition-centric view and toward the idea that a sentence’s meaning must be spelled out in terms of its various roles (...) in conversation. This communicative turn in semantics raises historical questions: Why was truth-conditional semantics dominant in the first place, and why were the phenomena now driving the communicative turn initially ignored or misunderstood by truth-conditional semanticists? I offer a historical answer to both questions. The history of natural-language semantics—springing from the work of Donald Davidson and Richard Montague—began with a methodological toolkit that Frege, Tarski, Carnap, and others had created to better understand artificial languages. For them, the study of linguistic meaning was subservient to other explanatory goals in logic, philosophy, and the foundations of mathematics, and this subservience was reflected in the fact that they idealized away from all aspects of meaning that get in the way of a one-to-one correspondence between sentences and truth-conditions. The truth-conditional beginnings of natural- language semantics are best explained by the fact that, upon turning their attention to the empirical study of natural language, Davidson and Montague adopted the methodological toolkit assembled by Frege, Tarski, and Carnap and, along with it, their idealization away from non-truth-conditional semantic phenomena. But this pivot in explana- tory priorities toward natural language itself rendered the adoption of the truth-conditional idealization inappropriate. Lifting the truth-conditional idealization has forced semanticists to upend the conception of linguistic meaning that was originally embodied in their methodology. (shrink)

The first volume in the series Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts offers a range of responses by distinguished philosophers and art historians to some crucial issues generated by the relationship between the art object and language in art history. Each of the chapters in this volume is a searching response to theoretical and practical questions in terms accessible to readers of all human science disciplines. The editors, one a philosopher and one an art historian, provide an (...) introductory chapter which outlines the themes of the volume and explicates the terms in which they are discussed. The contributors open new avenues of enquiry involving concepts of 'presence', 'projective properties', visual conventions and syntax, and the appropriateness of figurative language in accounting for visual art. The issues they discuss will challenge the boundaries to thought that some contemporary theorising sustains. (shrink)

Less than twenty years after computer science was able to establish itself as an academic discipline, a group of US computer scientists organized a conference on the history of programming languages. The conference is distinguished from other self-historicization projects by the organizer's claim to present an “accurate” account of their own discipline's history. However, the actors encountered challenges in terms of how to present their own history “objectively.” How to deal with incomplete memories? How to avoid putting (...) others in a bad light? There was far from agreement on these points and heated discussions ensued. Strategies had to be developed and compromises made to make the project a reality. The conference was intended to contribute to the history of computer science and the organizers sought exchange with professional historians. However, the project met with little interest among them. Rather, the discussion between the computer scientists and the historians shows how the history of science also struggled with questions of how to deal suitably with the past. In this respect, the Computer Scientists’ Conference not only illuminates the history of computer science, but also offers a new perspective on the history of the history of science. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to introduce Wittgenstein’s concept of the form of a language into geometry and to show how it can be used to achieve a better understanding of the development of geometry, from Desargues, Lobachevsky and Beltrami to Cayley, Klein and Poincaré. Thus this essay can be seen as an attempt to rehabilitate the Picture Theory of Meaning, from the Tractatus. Its basic idea is to use Picture Theory to understand the pictures of geometry. I (...) will try to show, that the historical evolution of geometry can be interpreted as the development of the form of its language. This confrontation of the Picture Theory with history of geometry sheds new light also on the ideas of Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Truth, Language, and History is the much-anticipated final volume of Donald Davidson's philosophical writings. In four groups of essays, Davidson continues to explore the themes that occupied him for more than fifty years: the relations between language and the world; speaker intention and linguistic meaning; language and mind; mind and body; mind and world; mind and other minds. He asks: what is the role of the concept of truth in these explorations? And, can a scientific world (...) view make room for human thought without reducing it to something material and mechanistic? Including a new introduction by his widow, Marcia Cavell, this volume completes Donald Davidson's colossal intellectual legacy. (shrink)

It has long been claimed that Homo sapiens is the only species that has language, but only recently has it been recognized that humans also have an unusual pattern of growth and development. Social mammals have two stages of pre-adult development: infancy and juvenility. Humans have two additional prolonged and pronounced life history stages: childhood, an interval of four years extending between infancy and the juvenile period that follows, and adolescence, a stage of about eight years that stretches (...) from juvenility to adulthood. We begin by reviewing the primary biological and linguistic changes occurring in each of the four pre-adult ontogenetic stages in human life history. Then we attempt to trace the evolution of childhood and juvenility in our hominin ancestors. We propose that several different forms of selection applied in infancy and childhood; and that, in adolescence, elaborated vocal behaviors played a role in courtship and intrasexual competition, enhancing fitness and ultimately integrating performative and pragmatic skills with linguistic knowledge in a broad faculty of language. A theoretical consequence of our proposal is that fossil evidence of the uniquely human stages may be used, with other findings, to date the emergence of language. If important aspects of language cannot appear until sexual maturity, as we propose, then a second consequence is that the development of language requires the whole of modern human ontogeny. Our life history model thus offers new ways of investigating, and thinking about, the evolution, development, and ultimately the nature of human language. (shrink)

At any time, basic assumptions about language have a direct effect on the writing of history. The structure of language is related to the structure of knowledge and thus to the definition of historical reality, while linguistic competence gives insights into the relation of ideas and action. Within the framework of these ideas, and drawing on recent work in linguistic theory, including that of the French structuralists. Professor Struever studies the major shift in attitudes toward language (...) and history which the Renaissance represents. One of the essential innovations of Renaissance Humanism is the substitution of rhetoric for dialectic as the dominant language discipline; rhetoric gives the Humanists their cohesion as a lay intellectual elite, as well as the force and direction of their thought. The author accepts the current trend in classical studies, the rehabilitation of the Sophists which finds its source in Nietzsche and includes the work of Rostagni, Untersteiner, and Buccellato, to reinstate rhetoric as the historical vehicle of Sophistic insight. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This bibliographical guide gives a comprehensive overview of the historiography of philosophy and thought in the Japanese language through an extensive and thematically organized collection of relevant literature. Comprising over one thousand entries, the bibliography shows not only how extensive and complex the Japanese tradition of philosophical and intellectual historiography is, but also how it might be structured and analyzed to make it accessible to a comparative and intercultural approach to the historiography of philosophy worldwide. The literature is categorized (...) and organized according to thematic focus areas such as geographical regions and continents, nations or peoples, religious traditions and philosophical teachings such as Buddhism, Islam, Shintō, and Confucianism, as well as disciplines such as ethics, aesthetics, and political thought. The bibliography is accompanied by an introduction outlining the research method as well as quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyzing the material, followed by a chronological overview of the historiography of philosophy and thought in the Japanese language and of the Japanese tradition of writing “world histories of philosophy.” As a first step towards a “history of the historiography of philosophy” in non-European languages, we hope that this guide will provide a useful tool for interculturally oriented scholarship aimed at a non-Eurocentric and diversified historiography of philosophy in a global perspective. (Open access, see link below.). (shrink)

The historical problem about the origins of the language of rights derives its importance from the conceptual problem: of "two fundamentally different ways of thinking about justice," which is basic? Is justice unitary or plural? This in turn opens up a problem about the moral status of human nature. A narrative of the origins of "rights" is an account of how and when a plural concept of justice comes to the fore, and will be based on the occurrence of (...) definite speech-forms—the occurrence of the plural noun in the sense of "legal properties." The history of this development is currently held to begin with the twelfth-century canonists. Later significant thresholds may be found in the fourteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth centuries. Wolterstorff's attempt to find the implicit recognition of rights in the Scriptures depends very heavily on what he takes to be implied rather than on what is stated, and at best can establish a pre- history of rights-language. (shrink)

Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno's Notes to Literature explores Adorno’s essays on literature as an independent contribution to his aesthetics with an emphasis on his theory and practice of literary interpretation. Essential to Adorno’s essays is his unorthodox treatment of language and history and his elaboration of the links between the two. One of Adorno’s major but often-neglected claims is that truth is relative to its historical medium, language. Adorno persistently and creatively tries (...) to narrow the gulf between truth and expression, philosophy and rhetoric, and his essays on literature are practical examples of his effort to critically rescue the rhetorical dimension of philosophy. Rather than relying exclusively on aesthetic concepts inherited from his predecessors in the Western tradition (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard), Adorno’s essays seek to transgress and transcend the conceptual limitations of aesthetic discourse by appropriating a non-conceptual, metaphorical vocabulary borrowed from the literary texts he investigates. Thus, Adorno’s interpretations of literature mobilize an alternative subterranean, primarily essayistic and fragmentary discourse on language and history that eludes the categories that tend to predominate his thinking in his major work, Aesthetic Theory. This book puts forth the claim that Adorno’s essays on literature are of central relevance for an understanding of his aesthetics because they challenge the conceptual limitations of philosophical discourse. (shrink)

In contemporary natural languages semantics one will often see the use of special brackets to enclose a linguistic expression, e.g. ⟦carrot⟧. These brackets---so-called denotation brackets or semantic evaluation brackets---stand for a function that maps a linguistic expression to its "denotation" or semantic value (perhaps relative to a model or other parameters). Even though this notation has been used in one form or another since the early development of natural language semantics in the 1960s and 1970s, Montague himself didn't make (...) use of this notation in his series of groundbreaking papers on semantics. That raises the question: When was the ⟦.⟧-notation introduced to semantics? This note answers that question. (shrink)

This book includes ten essays that trace the notion of unconcealment as it develops from Heidegger's early writings to his later work, shaping his philosophy of truth, language and history. 'Unconcealment' is the idea that what entities are depends on the conditions that allow them to manifest themselves. This concept, central to Heidegger's work, also applies to worlds in a dual sense: first, a condition of entities manifesting themselves is the existence of a world; and second, worlds themselves (...) are disclosed. The unconcealment or disclosure of a world is the most important historical event, and Heidegger believes there have been a number of quite distinct worlds that have emerged and disappeared in history. Heidegger's thought as a whole can profitably be seen as working out the implications of the original understanding of unconcealment. (shrink)

Language, like other human traits, could only have evolved during one or more stages of development. We enlist the theoretical framework of human life history to account for certain aspects of linguistic evolution, with special reference to initial phases in the process. It is hypothesized that selection operated at several developmental stages, the earlier ones producing new behaviors that were reinforced by additional, and possibly more powerful, forms of selection during later stages, especially adolescence and early adulthood. Peer (...) commentaries have provided opportunities to explain human life history more comprehensively, and to add details to our account of spoken language. We made no attempt to explain syntax in the target article, but we propose here that selection for “vocal plumage” may have increased our species’ capacity for utterance complexity, a development that would have benefited all levels of language. (shrink)

Language and thought are intimately related: philosophers have long debated how a given language may condition the oral and written expression of thought. The language chosen to communicate scientific discoveries may facilitate or impede international access to such knowledge. Vector and message may become intertwined in ways not yet fully understood: comparing and contrasting dictionary definitions of key terms, such as the Humboldtian Weltansicht, may provide useful insights into this process. Semantic prosody, a linguistic phenomenon brought to (...) light by corpus linguistics through the analysis of ever vaster corpora, may have unsuspected and even unconscious impacts on the perception of a message. A case study of data from WebsTerre, a diachronic corpus of geological English, explores a twentieth-century Kuhnian paradigm shift in Earth Science, from continental drift to plate tectonics, to demonstrate how interactions between semantic prosody and translation have the potential to alter the history of science. (shrink)

The aim of the research is to elucidate the key notions of the German mystic thinker Jacob Boehme’s linguistic-philosophical theory: language of Nature (Natursprache), Adamic language and sensual language in regard to each other and to post-Babel historical languages of humankind. This theory is considered in a dual context of the Late Renaissance “Adamicist” studies and of Boehme’s theosophical project as a whole. Since a considerable part of his work had a form of an extensive commentary on (...) Genesis, Boehme’s interpretations of the biblical stories are devoted to linguistic topics. Explaining the stories concerning Babel (Gen. 11), the theosophist gives some considerations to the essence of historic transformation and loss of the primordial language. Based on the story of Adam’s naming of the animals (Gen. 2:19–20), Boehme formulates his views on the substance of Natural and Adamic languages. It is argued that, according to the theosophist, the rise of polyglottism, caused by Babel catastrophe, was a culmination of spiritual disorientation of humankind. Having started from the Fall, that process led to a fundamental distortion of ideas about being and the Deity. Due to this, people decided to look for Him in a reified form by technical means. A cognitive and linguistic aspect of that disorientation consisted in alienating of still single primordial language from Natursprache as its ontological foundation. Boehme thought that this alienation mainly caused rapid development of linguistic pluralism. Meanwhile, the language of Nature was a unique “guide,” which made possible for Adam to create his epistemically perfect language, and his descendants could keep its understanding for some time. (shrink)

The roots of pragmatics reach back to Antiquity, especially to rhetoric as one of the three liberal arts. However, until the end of the 18th century proto-pragmatic insights tended to be consigned to the pragmatic, that is rhetoric, wastepaper basket and thus excluded from serious philosophical consideration. It can be said that pragmatics was conceived between 1780 and 1830 in Britain, but also in Germany and in France in post-Lockian and post-Kantian philosophies of language. These early ‘conceptions’ of pragmatics (...) are described in the first part of the book. The second part of the book looks at pragmatic insights made between 1830 and 1880, when they were once more relegated to the philosophical and linguistic underground. The main stage was then occupied by a fact-hunting historical comparative linguistics on the one hand and a newly spiritualised philosophy on the other. In the last part the period between 1880 and 1930 is presented, when pragmatic insights flourished and were sought after systematically. This was due in part to a new upsurge in empiricism, positivism and later behaviourism in philosophy, linguistics and psychology. Between 1780 and 1930 philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and linguists came to see that language could only be studied in the context of dialogue, in the context of human life and finally as being a kind of human action itself. (shrink)

When linguistics was first established as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, it was envisaged as an essentially historical study. Languages were to be treated as historical objects, evolving through gradual but constant processes of change over long periods of time. In recent years, however, there has been much discussion by historians of a 'linguistic turn' in their own discipline, and, in linguistics, integrationist theory has mounted a radical challenge to the traditional notion of 'languages' as possible objects of (...) inquiry. _Language and History_ develops the integrationist critique of orthodox linguistics, while at the same time extending its implications to the field of history. By doing so, it throws light on what is now recognized by many historians to be a 'crisis' in their own discipline. Underlying the post-modernist scepticism about traditional forms of historiography, the integrationist approach reveals a more deep-seated problem concerning the interface between philosophy of history and philosophy of language. With chapters from a range of leading international contributors, _Language and History _represents a significant contribution to the developing work of the integrationists. (shrink)

The first volume in the series Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts offers a range of responses by distinguished philosophers and art historians to some crucial issues generated by the relationship between the art object and language in art history. Each of the chapters in this volume is a searching response to theoretical and practical questions in terms accessible to readers of all human science disciplines. The editors, one a philosopher and one an art historian, provide an (...) introductory chapter which outlines the themes of the volume and explicates the terms in which they are discussed. The contributors open new avenues of enquiry involving concepts of 'presence', 'projective properties', visual conventions and syntax, and the appropriateness of figurative language in accounting for visual art. The issues they discuss will challenge the boundaries to thought that some contemporary theorising sustains. (shrink)

For the first time in English, this anthology offers a comprehensive selection of primary sources in the history of philosophy of language. Beginning with a detailed introduction contextualizing the subject, the editors draw out recurring themes, including the origin of language, the role of nature and convention in fixing form and meaning, language acquisition, ideal languages, varieties of meanings, language as a tool, and the nexus of language and thought, linking them to representative texts. (...) The handbook moves on to offer seminal contributions from philosophers ranging from the pre-Socratics up to John Stuart Mill, preceding each major historical section with its own introductory assessment. With all of the most relevant primary texts on the philosophy of language included, covering well over two millennia, this judicious, and generous, selection of source material will be an indispensable research tool for historians of philosophy, as well as for philosophers of language, in the twenty-first century. A vital tool for researchers and contemporary philosophers, it will be a touchstone for much further research, with coverage of a long and varied tradition that will benefit today's scholars and enhance their awareness of earlier contributions to the field. (shrink)

Renowned scholar of Ancient Greek Martin Ostwald explains, for a modern audience, the terms by which the ancient Greeks saw and lived their lives—and ...

AS THE subtlest part of his see-saw strategy in the Cratylus, Socrates recites several dozen comic etymologies. One of their explicit lessons is that the founders of language were Heracliteans who concealed the ontology of flux in common names. Socrates gives the etymologies, he says, to illustrate the Heraclitean Cratylus's pronouncement that names are natural. The etymologies are bait for Cratylus, of course; they are meant to lure him into a defense of his dogma. But they are more than (...) a stratagem. The Socratic etymologies raise the question whether philosophy can escape the history of its language--a history perhaps of concealed ontology or the tyranny of sense-experience or the myths of one's forefathers. Philosophy as articulate falls under forces, multiple and hardly known, which shape linguistic meaning. A question for Socrates, which I would like to make my own, is the question whether metaphysical inquiry can appropriate the history of the languages in which it must subsist. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The question of this article is whether the saturated phenomenon as articulated in the early work of Jean-Luc Marion may appear within language and history, or in other words how a non- or extra-horizonal event can appear within the horizons necessary for communication and communality. This problem is significant, among other reasons, because saturated aesthetic, ethical, and religious phenomena constitute important bases for communal values. The article argues that Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophy of language offers resources that (...) allow us to understand how a saturated phenomenon can appear communicably and communally without sacrificing the irreducible excessiveness of its appearance. The author draws on parallels between Marion and Gadamer to argue that the poetic word and the conversation present possibilities of the saturated phenomenon occurring within language and history, and suggests the “saturated question” as a name for this mode of appearance. (shrink)

The endeavor of this bibliographical guide is inscribed in the broader effort to reframe the discipline of Philosophy in a global perspective through the account of its history. With the present work readers will gain a broad overview of the materials available in Italian on the histories of philosophy in different regions of the world from the first editions, in the 15th century, to the present. Some of these materials are presented in the extensive introduction to the bibliography, which (...) has been organized according to geographical regions, such as continents and nations, as well as thematic focuses, such as religions, doctrines, or disciplines. Moreover, the introduction discusses two main themes, namely the strong historiographical tradition in Italy and its close connection with political agendas, and the influence of the history of philosophy in the schools. One outcome of the work is the mapping of leading research areas as well as neglected areas, and even the uncovering of some blind spots. (shrink)

In this witty and fascinating book, Premack examines arguments over whether humans are unique because we can talk.