The problem of necessity remains one of the central issues in modern philosophy. The authors of this volume, originally published in 1985, developed a new approach to the problem, which focusses on th
It is generally accepted that language is primarily a means of communication. But do we always mean what we say – must we mean something when we talk? This book explores the other side of language, wh
This book, originally published in 1963 provides a sample of the criticisms of philosophers on the course of linguistic philosophy. A chronological ordr is followed, with work ranging from that of tra
Since the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, Anglophone epistemologists have devoted a great deal of attention to the English word 'know' and to English sentences used to attribute knowledge. Eve
Vagueness is the study of concepts that admit borderline cases: the property of being bald is vague because there are people who are neither definitely bald, nor definitely not bald. The epistemology
Imagine you are sitting at Starbuck glancing at the blue coffee mug in front of you. The mug is blue on the outside, white on the inside. It's large for a mug. And it's nearly full of freshly made cof
Our personal and political worlds are rife with arguments and disagreements, some of them petty and vitriolic. The inability to compromise and understand the opposition is epidemic today, from countri
Truth is not just a recent topic of contention. Arguments about it have gone on for centuries. Why is the truth important? Who decides what the truth is? Is there such a thing as objective, eterna
Considering the interrelations between sight, touch, and imagination, this book surveys classical, late antique, and medieval theories of vision to elaborate on how various spheres of the Byzantine world categorized and comprehended sensation and perception. Revisiting scholarly assumptions about the tactility of sight in the Byzantine world, it demonstrates how the haptic language associated with vision referred to the cognitive actions of the viewer as they grasped sensory data in the mind in order to comprehend and produce working imaginations of objects for thought and memory. At stake is how the affordances and limitations of the senses came to delineate and cultivate the manner in which art and rhetoric was understood as mediating the realities they wished to convey. This would similarly come to contour how Byzantine religious culture could also go about accessing the sacred, the image serving as a site of desire for the mediated representation of the Divine.
From the vantage point of doing philosophy of language comparatively, Philosophy of Language, Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy explores how reflective elaboration of some distinct features of Chin
One of the most important research programmes in contemporary cognitive science is that of extended cognition, whereby features of a subject's cognitive environment can in certain conditions become co
Humans naturally acquire languages that connect meanings with pronunciations. Paul M. Pietroski presents an account of these distinctive languages as generative procedures that respect substantive con
What strength of evidence is required for knowledge? Ordinarily, we often claim to know something on the basis of evidence which doesn't guarantee its truth. For instance, one might claim to know that
Contemporary philosophy of science analyzes psychology as a science with special features, because this discipline includes some specific philosophical problems – descriptive and normative, structural
With a quality all their own, Wittgenstein's Family Letters reveal a side of Ludwig Wittgenstein few would have known. The familiarity and intimacy of the letters offer new insights into the developme
Shortly after composing his Opus maius, Opus minus, and Opus tertium (1267) Bacon felt the need once again to call attention to obstacles to the achievement of wisdom placed by the Church, academia, a
Herman Cappelen investigates ways in which language (and other representational devices) can be defective, and how they can be improved. In all parts of philosophy there are philosophers who criticize
The new field of experimental philosophy has emerged as the methods of psychological science have been brought to bear on traditional philosophical issues. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy is
The new field of experimental philosophy has emerged as the methods of psychological science have been brought to bear on traditional philosophical issues. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy is
The capacity to speak is not only the ability to pronounce words, but the socially-recognized capacity to make one's words count in various ways. We rely on this capacity whenever we tell another per
