Philosophy of Language Commons^™

Propositional Names, Ryan Christensen

Philosophy Faculty Publications

I propose that an adequate name for a proposition will be (1) rigid, in Kripke’s sense of referring to the same thing in every world in which it exists, and (2) transparent, which means that it would be possible, if one knows the name, to know which object the name refers. I then argue that the Standard Way of naming propositions—prefixing the word ‘that’ to a declarative sentence—does not allow for transparent names of every proposition, and that no alternative naming convention does better. I explore the implications of this failure for deflationism about truth, arguing that any theory that …

Late Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, And Their Aftermath, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Developments in Anglo-American philosophy during the first half of the 20^th Century closely tracked developments that were occurring in continental philosophy during this period. This should not surprise us. Aside from the fertile communication between these ostensibly separate traditions, both were responding to problems associated with the rise of mass society. Rabid nationalism, corporate statism, and totalitarianism (Left and Right) posed a profound challenge to the idealistic rationalism of neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian philosophies. The decline of the individual – classically conceived by the 18th-century Enlightenment as a self-determining agent – provoked strong reactions. While some philosophical tendencies sought to …

Affirmative Judgments: The Sabbath Of Deconstruction, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

For reasons that are equally strategic and philosophical, we need to understand that the correct answer to the question ‘What is deconstruction?’ is that deconstruction is the unconditional affirmation of the undeconstructible. Calling upon Derrida, Kant, and Hegel, Végső posits that the fact that we have almost completely lost sight of this dimension of deconstructive thought accounts for much of the confusion surrounding its ethical and political force. In order to clarify some of these points, an explanation of the nature of this unconditional affirmation is needed. Végső puts forth the proposition that the truth of deconstruction is aptly encapsulated …

Aesthetics And The Philosophy Of Art, 1840-1900, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The question can be raised whether the category or discipline of philosophical aesthetics existed before the eighteenth century. Unlike "logic:' "ethics:' and "physics:' a traditional Stoic division of philosophy with great staying power, "aesthetics" is clearly a product of modernity. As Paul O. Kristeller demonstrated in "The Modern System of the Arts:' it was in the eighteenth century that the idea of the aesthetic as a distinctive human capacity and the parallel consolidation of the notion of the fine arts crystallized in the writings of (mostly) French, German, and English philosophers and critics. The modern concepts of art and aesthetics …

The Truth About Kant On Lies, James E. Mahon

Publications and Research

In this chapter I argue that there are three different senses of 'lie' in Kant's moral philosophy: the lie in the ethical sense (the broadest sense, which includes lies to oneself), the lie in the 'juristic' sense (the narrowest sense, which only includes lies that specifically harm particular others), and the lie in the sense of right (or justice), which is narrower than the ethical sense, but broader than the juristic sense, since it includes all lies told to others, including those who are bent on harming innocent others.

La Quête Poétique Dans L’Oeuvre De Fouad Gabriel Naffah, Georges Khoriaty

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In his poetic search, Fouad Gabriel Naffah states his conception of a poetic image revealing the absolute and the universal, his verbal adventure which consists of disintegrating the conventional language with sclerotic forms in order to have access to the authenticity and to ensure the everlasting poem. He also sets out the poetry of the imaginary which, through a dialectic and harmonization of contradictories, extends all over the universe to include and reach the study of the eternal return that satisfies his longing for eternity.

Assassins And Crusaders: Nietzsche After 9/11, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Nietzsche describes his four Unzeitgemiisse Betrachtungen as Attentate, assassination attempts. The first of these, his self-described "duel" with David Friedrich Strauss, published in 1873, begins with the question of war and time. It is untimely or out of season insofar as it challenges the smugness of the cultural philistines who take Germany's victory in the Franco-Prussian War to be a testament to the superiority of German culture. As those in the United States might have learned after the end of the Cold War and after the first Gulf War, "a great victory is a great danger," and we might …

Vico’S New Science Of Interpretation: Beyond Philosophical Hermeneutics And The Hermeneutics Of Suspicion, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The article situates Vico's hermeneutical science of history between a hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricoeur, Habermas, Freud) and a redemptive hermeneutics (Gadamer, Benjamin). It discusses Vico's early writings and his ambivalent trajectory from Cartesian rationalism to counter-enlightenment historicist and critic of natural law reasoning. The complexity of Vico's thinking belies some of the popular treatments of his thought developed by Isaiah Berlin and others.

A Critical Discussion Of Talking Past One Another, Jeffrey C. Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

One sort of usage of the phrase ‘talking past one another’ that is quite prevalent in the philosophical literature suggests the following account of a particular phenomenon of miscommunication: Agent A and agent B talk past one another during a philosophical discussion if and only if A has in mind one meaning or conception of a crucial expression P that is distinct from some meaning or conception of P had in mind by B.  In this paper, however, I argue that this account – given the sort of phenomenon it is intended to be an account of – misses the …

Seeking An Aesthetics Of Metafiction, Erin J. Vachon

Senior Honors Projects

According the Oxford English Dictionary, metafiction is ‘fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions…and narrative techniques.’ In short, metafiction announces itself as a textual artifact and examines the very nature of fiction. Metafiction has been defined as such, but I seek the effect of the text upon the act of reading and the reader: into what space is the reader initiated when the boundaries between author-text-reader become dismantled or confused? What does the act of reading become, beyond a mere analytic exercise? I am searching …

Foucault And The Hupomnemata: Self Writing As An Art Of Life, Matthias Swonger

Senior Honors Projects

Michel Foucault tells us about a form of self writing called the hupomnemata in an essay titled Self Writing in his book Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. In its simplest definition, the hupomnemata is a notebook, or journal of sorts for the Ancient Greeks. However, unlike the intimate, confessional journals later found in Christian literature, the hupomnemata does not intend “to pursue the unspeakable, nor to reveal the hidden, nor to say the unsaid, but on the contrary to capture the already said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less …

Derrida’S Deconstruction Of Logocentrism: Implications For Trauma Studies, Julie Elaine Goodspeed-Chadwick

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This article examines Derrida’s conception of logocentrism as it is discussed throughout the entirety of his seminal work Of Grammatology, as well as in his collected interviews, Points...: 1974-1994. Systematically refuting logocentrism, Derrida’s deconstruction enables exposure of the mechanisms, such as binary constructions, that exert a dominant—and domineering—influence over marginalized people, places, and concepts. Specifically, presence and the (falsehood of the) totality of the sign define logocentrism, and these terms cannot productively contribute to trauma studies because it is precisely in texts and textuality that embodied states can be studied. Texts are themselves material embodiments that display …

The New Black's, Peter Tiersma

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Notes On Wittgenstein’S Method, The Practice Of Cultural History, And Early Film Theory, Markus Rheindorf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Markus Rheindorf's contribution offers some reflections on the critical potential of Ludwig Wittgenstein's uebersichtliche Darstellungor concise presentation, his self-consciously employed method of philosophical writing in the 1930s, and explores its theoretical and methodological potential for the practice of cultural history. In so doing, it articulates a substantial critique of conventional disciplinary historiography, taking as its case in point the history of (early) film theory. Rheindorf then takes up the suggestions gained from juxtaposing Wittengstein's method with conventional accounts of the history of early film theory and suggests concrete ways in which these might be put to practical use in the …

Brown Meets Green: The Political Fecology Of Poopreport.Com, Marisol Cortez

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In engaging with the culture of filth, Marisol Cortez's Brown Meets Green: The Political Fecology of PoopReport.com questions contemporary cultural criticism's emphasis on shit's textual ambivalence. In order to avoid relapsing into either the Bakhtinian celebration of the grotesque or the too narrowly conceived Kristevan category of the abject, Cortez argues, and to find a way out of this theoretical dualism, one must rethink the very categories of filth and waste through an ecocritical reading of the scatological -- the meeting of brown and green -- performed at the confluence of ecology, cultural studies, and Marxist political economy. This perspective …

Introduction To Ellipsis And Non-Sentential Speech, Ray Elugardo, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Foucault And Habermas, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The article is a comprehensive comparison of Foucault and Habermas which focuses on their distinctive styles of critical theory. The article maintains that Foucault's virtue ethical understanding of aesthetic self-realization as a form of resistance to normalizing practices provides counterpoint to Habermas's more juridical approach to institutional justice and the critique of ideology. The article contains an extensive discussion of their respective treatments of speech action, both strategic and communicative, and concludes by addressing Foucault's understanding of parrhesia as a non-discursive form of truth-telling.

An Extended Lewis-Stalnaker Semantics And The New Problem Of Counterpossibles,, Jeffrey C. Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

Closest-possible-world analyses of counterfactuals suffer from what has been called the ‘problem of counterpossibles’: some counterfactuals with metaphysically impossible antecedents seem plainly false, but the proposed analyses imply that they are all (vacuously) true.  One alleged solution to this problem is the addition of impossible worlds.  In this paper, I argue that the closest possible or impossible world analyses that have recently been suggested suffer from the ‘new problem of counterpossibles’: the proposed analyses imply that some plainly true counterpossibles (viz., ‘counterlogicals’) are false.  After motivating and presenting the ‘new problem’, I give reasons to think that …

The Subject, Étienne Balibar, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This selection is a partial translation of the entry “Subject,” written by Etienne Balibar for the Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies, directed by Barbara Cassin and forthcoming from Éditions du Seuil and Le Robert.

Where Is Sherlock Holmes?, Jeffrey C. Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

Most philosophers would say that fictional characters lack spatiotemporal location simply because such entities do not exist.  However, even prominent believers in ficta hold that they must lack location.  I here focus on the views of one such believer, Amie Thomasson, and her Artifactual Theory.  The fundamentals of her ontology seem correct, but I argue that the view implies that ficta do have location.  I provide a diagnosis of an argument Thomasson gives for the contrary, and then suggest a way for the Artifactual Theory to account for the locations of ficta.  I conclude by discussing some potential applications of …

Dworkin's Fallacy, Or What The Philosophy Of Language Can't Teach Us About The Law, Michael S. Green

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Vagueness, Ignorance, And Margins For Error, Kenton Machina, Harry Deutsch

Faculty Publications - Philosophy

We argue that the epistemic theory of vagueness cannot adequately justify its key tenet–that vague predicates have precisely bounded extensions, of which we are necessarily ignorant. Nor can the theory adequately account for our ignorance of the truth values of borderline cases. Furthermore, we argue that Williamson's promising attempt to explicate our understanding of vague language on the model of a certain sort of "inexact knowledge" is at best incomplete, since certain forms of vagueness do not fit Williamson's model, and in fact fit an alternative model. Finally, we point out that a certain kind of irremediable inexactitude postulated by …

When Artists Fail: A Reply To Trivedi, Sheila Lintott

Faculty Journal Articles

In a recent article, ‘An Epistemic Dilemma for Actual Intentionalism’, Saam Trivedi argues that the way we ought to interpret artworks is best understood using the model proposed by hypothetical intentionalism. Trivedi alleges that actual intentionalism faces a serious dilemma, the upshot of which is that actual intentionalists must choose between redundancy and indeterminacy. Largely on the basis of this dilemma, he concludes that even if actual intentionalism is descriptively accurate, it is prescriptively untenable. In this essay, I focus on this alleged dilemma and argue that, contra Trivedi, it fails to undermine the prescriptive legitimacy of moderate actual intentionalism. …

馬克思主義概念翻譯在中國1900-1949, Yongye Xiao

Lingnan Theses

本論文探討馬克思主義經由翻譯介紹到中國的歷史過程。馬克思主義作為中共立國的意識形態，已經成為一種權威的話語。但在本世紀初經由翻譯傳入的馬克思主義，並不是一套教條。在二十世紀初到二、三十年代間，多種思潮互相衝擊，馬克思主義在翻譯傳入的過程中，也是知識份子分析社會矛盾性質和思考社會變革的思想資源。對馬克思主義的翻譯與介紹，揭示了翻譯本身是在一定的文化政治的位置中的論述踐行。

本論文以幾個馬克思主義概念為例，將這些概念置放於其歷史脈絡中，考察這些概念在個別知識份子的著述中怎樣被理解，討論翻譯的過程中牽涉的各種閱讀策略，並嘗試說明它們如何構築各種身分。論文嘗試說明這些概念的互譯性是藉著種種論述與實踐建立起來的。

The Philosophy Of Don Quixote: A Look At The Character Using Heidegger’S Authenticity, Matthew D. Mangum

Honors Program Theses and Research Projects

The following paper will take an existential philosophical idea and apply it to a renaissance novel featuring a medieval character. The existential idea of authenticity as explained by Martin Heidegger will be outlined and then used to evaluate the main character of Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote, the knight-errant Don Quixote de la Mancha.

Meaning, Creativity And The Partial Inscrutability Of The Human Mind, By Julius Moravcsik, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

"Give Me A Break!" Emerson On Fruit And Flowers, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

"Give me a break!" This expression appears to be an imperative or a request. In colloquial English, it can be either, or it can be uttered with various degrees of irony as a complaint, an objection, or a reproof. I want to begin by considering it in a relatively serious way, by asking what it means to ask someone to give, and to give a break. According to some analyses in a certain discourse on the gift (for example, in Nietzsche, Bataille, Levinas, and Derrida), the gift is always a break of some sort. It is an interruption, an excess, …

The "Confessing Animal" On Stage: Authenticity, Asceticism, And The Constant "Inconstancie" Of Elizabethan Character, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

For persons persuaded by the rhetoric of sixteenth-century religious reformers, authenticity was a complex matter of access to the reality of divinity. George Levin's paper on empiricist "habits of mind" seems a strange place to start elaborating on that observation, for such "habits" look to be worlds apart from what I study, the sixteenth-century Calvinist adaptations of patristic and medieval ascetic spirituality. Yet Levin maintains that he has identified empiricism's near-ascetic techniques. "To know nature," he claims, "one must make it alien ... and deny one's own desire." If he is correct about "the programmatically self-alienating" character of "the positivist …

Syntactic Theory And The Structure Of English: A Minimalist Approach, By A. Radford, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

The Alphabet And The Ideograph: The Abcs Of Political Conflict?, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article describes a possible source of political differences among people based on language differences.