The Philosophy of Language

By Aloysius P. Martinich and A.P. Martinich

Book Overview

What is meaning? How is linguistic communication possible? What is the nature of language? What is the relationship between language and the world? How do metaphors work? The Philosophy of Language, considered the essential text in its field, is an excellent introduction to such fundamental questions. This revised edition collects forty-one of the most important articles in the field, making it the most up-to-date and comprehensive volume on the subject. The fourth edition features several new articles including influential work by Bertrand Russell, John R. Searle, John Perry, Ruth Garrett Millikan, and John Stuart Mill. Other selections include classic articles by such distinguished philosophers as Gottlob Frege, P. F. Strawson, J. L. Austin, Hilary Putnam, and David Kaplan.The selections represent evolving and varying approaches to the philosophy of language, with many articles building upon earlier ones or critically discussing them. Eight sections cover the central issues: Truth and Meaning; Speech Acts; Reference and Descriptions; Names and Demonstratives; Propositional Attitudes; Metaphor; Interpretation and Translation; and The Nature of Language. The revised general introduction and introductions to each section give students background to the issues and explain the connections between them. A list of suggested further reading follows each section.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195035534
• ISBN13: 9780195035537
• Release Date: February 1985
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.6" x 1.1" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Anthologies = Good

I, being both a philosophy student and a person with an unreliable attention span, would generally recommend Oxford's anthologies in modern philosophy. It is much more manageable than reading a whole work written by a single author, and it is a real timesaver if you simply want a broad overview of what is going on. I am fixated on semantics, so the Reference and Names sections really did it for me. Do not forget to check out...

Just the Classics

Anyone serious about meaning in language should read these articles. They provide a baseline on which all other work builds. Whether you are interdisciplinary or only care about linguistics, philosophy, artificial intelligence or cognition, this book is one must-read paper after another.I used it for both my graduate semantics and undergraduate philosophy of language classes at Carnegie Mellon. You can read these papers...