Philosophy of Language Commons^™

The Language Of Transformation In A "Conversation For Possibility": A Metaphor Analysis, Deborah Jean Gabbert

Dissertations and Theses

Metaphor allows us to understand and experience "relatively abstract or unstructured subject matter in terms of more concrete, or at least more highly structured subject matter". Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) and Lakoff's (1993) contemporary theory of metaphor contends that: metaphor is fundamentally conceptual; metaphoric structuring is the basis for the organization and functioning of much of the ordinary human conceptual system; and metaphorical language found in everyday speech is a surface manifestation of underlying conceptual metaphors. The metaphors most salient in a culture's discourse will reveal something about what is thinkable, knowable, and doable in that culture. Metaphors have the …

Wittgenstein On Freedom Of The Will, Grant Allen Marler

Institute for the Humanities Theses

This thesis is an exposition and clarification of two lectures on freedom of the will delivered by Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1939. Wittgenstein asks whether it makes sense to say that the "decision of a person was not free because it was determined by natural laws." I offer a brief explanation and defense of Wittgenstein's method of linguistic analysis, then proceed in its spirit. Associated with the words 'determined' and 'free' are certain pictures which, if misapplied, may lead us to misjudge their function. Among these are the picture of natural laws as "rails" that compel events, and that the meaning …

Dynamics Of Meaning, By G. Chierchia, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Socrates' Embassy To Cratylus, Jason Lohr

Anthós Journal (1990-1996)

Plato, in the Cratylus, promotes truth as the principal men should aspire to. Socrates beckons us to, by example, smash the dialogue in search for meaning. In doing so; one cannot be sure if one has exited through the same door one has entered or not. It is certain, however, that Socrates would have approved of the search for Plato's truth.

Go Figure! Refiguring Disfiguring, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In his extraordinary book, Disfiguring, Mark Taylor bursts into the marketplace of the contemporary artworld by bringing together the idea of the death of God with that of the death of art. In the artworld prices of Van Goghs, Monets, and Warhols go up and down; the glossy journals like Art in America chronicle these values discreetly and contain prospectuses for investments, whether in the form of actual advertising or in the pieces pushing the latest artist or style, or looking for hidden value in an old one. In this marketplace the death of God is also, it seems, …

L'Abîme De La Vision, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Revenant a l'œuvre monumentale de Mikel Dufrenne sur la Phénomenologie de l'experience esthétique pour la considérer sous l'angle de l'évolution de notre compréhension de la phénoménologie depuis 1953, force est de constaterque Dufrenne se distançait déjà quelque peu d'une phénoménologie et d'une esthétique de la présence. Forts de la lecture des derniers essais de Heidegger et de notre confrontation à la poursuite par Derrida de cette interrogation sur l'onto-théologie, peut-être avons-nous de notre côté trop facilement présumé que la tradition phénoménologique opérait presque impulsivement sous le signe de la présence, ce qui a fait de nous des experts peut-être …

Review Of G.L.Hallett's Language And Truth, Kenton Machina

Faculty Publications - Philosophy

Review of Garth L.. Hallett's Language and Truth, Yale U. Press

The Cratylus: An Explication, Elizabeth Upham

Anthós Journal (1990-1996)

In Plato’s Cratylus, Socrates, Hermogenes, and Cratylus attempt to discover if things are named with consideration to phusis or nomos. This paper traces these arguments throughout Plato’s dialogue. In the end, Plato is suggesting that Socrates is like a legislator with the power to bestow appropriate names to things, even as he hides Socrates behind a thin veil of uncertainty. Ultimately the reader must make up his or her own mind, why is Socrates so full of contradictions and why does Plato portray him this way.

Strategic Meaning: Words As Tools Or Traps, Debra Blankenship

Anthós Journal (1990-1996)

Upon initial glance, Plato’s Cratylus appears to be a grand romp of words with Socrates’s wit front and center. But a closer examination of the text shows a deadly serious, carefully plotted battle by Socrates to establish his philosophical perspective as preeminent. Plato thus reveals, by the end of the dialogue, that the true battle that Socrates is waging is the struggle to establish what foundation knowledge shall be built upon.

The Importance Of Language In Plato's Cratylus, Jeffrey Tinnin

Anthós Journal (1990-1996)

By suggesting that Plato’s Cratylus is in the form of a ring composition, this paper explores how this form plays out within the context of a dialogue on the nature of language. It traces the ring composition form as it applies to the issue of naming. In the end it argues that for Plato the development of language is essential for the growth and maintenance of the soul. The twin structures of the ring compositional form enable this understanding in interesting and complex ways.

The Art Of Fiction, Steven Workman

Bouwsma Paper Contest

Thinking about fiction raises some important questions that need to be answered if we are to grasp the essence of a fictional work. The questions I feel a theory of fiction needs to answer are as follows; Why do we react emotionally to fictional works when we are campletely aware of their fictionality? Why do we re-read books when we know what happens before re-reading? How are we to judge a work of fiction as a work of art’ When trying to come up with a theory of fiction, philosophers have proposed a wide range af solutions. These solutions have …

The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Five), Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

This, the fifth in a series on the history and ambitions of punctuation, describes the first vigorous manifestation of logical pointing. In an enlightened atmosphere of book reading and language consciousness, it was discerned that the shapes of sentences and their working parts were better delineated when punctuated syntactically.

The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Four), Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

This, the fourth in a series of essays on the history of punctuation, deals with Renaissance and Jacobean England, a period of intense experiment both in language and in the bookmaking arts. Printing, now fully in action, governed the public perception of what looked best on the page and how text should be pointed and spelled. Special attention is given to authors such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.

The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Three), Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

This is the third in a series of articles on the past and future of punctuation. The years under focus here are crucial ones, for they include the invention of the printing press and the shift it caused in the human response to the written word.

The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Two), Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

Part One of this serialized survey (Courier 23.2, Fall 1988) dealt with the emergence of a late-Classical and early-Christian interest in eliciting, with 'euphuistic' punctating techniques, the voice patterns inherent in text. Part Two, herewith, gives attention to the Middle Ages. In this haphazard era, logical punctuation, which concentrates on syntactical structures and is therefore more appealing to eye than ear, begins its faltering growth.

The Punctator's World: A Discursion, Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

"The Punctator's World: A Discursion" is a study, in several parts, of the origins of punctuation and its development to the present day. Part One, herewith, follows the subject from its murky beginnings into the broad daylight of classical usage.

The Vorpel Blade: A Philosophical Adventure In Meaning, Patrick Cely

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Fol.r major accounts of linguistic meaning are considered. A referential theory of meaning as developed by Bertrand Russell is considered and rejected on the grounds of some critical observations made by P. F. Strawson. An instrumentalistic theory of meaning as adopted by Ludwig Wittgenstein is next considered and found after an evaluation by C. S. Chihara and J. A. Fodor to be inconclusive. A behavioristic theory of meaning as advocated by Charles W. Morris is considered next. Based on questions posed by L. O. Kattsoff this theory of meaning is found to be, at best, incomplete. Finally, an ideational account …

Canons, Careers, And Campfollowers: Randall And The Historiography Of Philosophy, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

For some very good reasons John Herman Randall, Jr. saw himself as an innovator and a deviant within the discourse that is called the history of philosophy. In an early chapter of The Career of Philosophy he pronounces this characteristically salty judgment on the main tendency of such work:

The history of philosophy, in truth, since German professors captured it and made it the handmaiden of academic advancement, has been a rigid tradition. Philosophy began with Thales, it falls neatly into Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, and it culminates in the men now writing for your favorite philosophical journal, God forgive …

An Ancient Quarrel In Hegel’S Phenomenology, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The Phenomenology of Spirit has been in rich and equal measures a source of both frustration and fascination to its readers. Coming to it from the more conventional texts of our tradition (even including Hegel's later writings) readers have been puzzled, first, by the structure of the Phenomenology. Despite his suggestions that he is following an actual historical development of some sort Hegel will pass from the Terror of 1793-94 to prehistoric religions of nature, or from Kantian universality in morality to the life of the Greek polis. In addition the Phenomenology contains a vast number of allusions to particular …

Wit And Humor In Asl, Keila Tooley

Masters Theses

In his article "Linguistics and the Study of Poetic Language," Stankewicz (1960) characterizes poetic organization as "completely embedded in language and fully determined by its possibilities." The purpose of this study is to examine the form that poetic function assumes in a language that itself has a structural organization fundamentally different from that of oral languages and in which, accordingly, the possibilities for poetic organization are radically different.

In wit and poetry, elements of form and meaning—a linguistic system--are used to create complex multi-layered expressions with multiple meanings and systems of form and meaning. Similarities--and differences—in form, function and meaning …

The Man Of Letters And The Author Of Nature: Hume On Philosophical Discourse, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Recent philosophy in the English language manifests a concern with the status and nature of the philosophical text which seems virtually unprecedented in Anglo-American thought. The very suggestion that the concept of the philosophical text ought to be taken seriously by philosophers (as opposed to publishers or literary historians) appears to be a recent addition to our world of discourse. For in the dominant tradition of Anglo-American philosophy, the philosophical enterprise has usually been construed as an open-ended inquiry, a posing and sharpening of questions, counter-questions, objections, and refutations in which the important thing is doing philosophy. So far this …

From The Sublime To The Political: Some Historical Notes, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Let me document my suggestion that modernist poetics tends to give a privileged position to what has traditionally been known as the sublime by adducing two examples from rather disparate traditions. Martin Heidegger's ontological poetics can reasonably be viewed as a renewal of the aesthetics of the sublime -- although Heidegger never uses the term sublime, so far as I know -- and is explicitly hostile to the limitations of aesthetics, conceived as an autonomous study of a certain kind of experience. Harold Bloom does recur to the Romantic terminology of sublimity in his attempt to construct a poetics which …

Nietzschean Aphorism As Art And Act, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Nietzsche is commonly said to be an aphoristic writer, perhaps the master of the aphorism. Yet it is not clear what is entailed by this stylistic designation or how far it takes us in understanding Nietzsche's thought and writing. It is a mistake to see Nietzsche's writings as exclusively aphoristic, if this is meant to imply that his writings lack philosophical and literary structure. Certainly sections of those books (conveniently numbered and titled) can be regarded as independent aphorisms (if aphorisms are ever independent, a question which must be assessed). In fact the long third essay of The Genealogy of …

Peirce And Derrida On First And Last Things, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The movement of philosophical ideas across national and linguistic borders, especially in these days of international conferences, is notoriously slower than the physical movements of philosophers themselves. When rumblings of new names or new ideas come from afar, there is a rather predictable but unphilosophical tendency to claim that the putative new thoughts are either old hat, trivial or absurd; this trichotomy is not much of an improvement on the older positivistic dichotomy of tautologically trivial or merely empirical. Jacques Derrida is a philosopher of some eminence in France who has generally been subjected to such treatment by English-speaking philosophers, …

Some Genres Of Post-Hegelian Philosophy, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

There are a number of important texts, sometimes treated as philosophical and sometimes as literary works, which do not usually find an appropriate audience. Paradigms of what I have in mind are: Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings, almost all of Nietzsche, Marx's narratives of capital and class-struggle, Sartre's complex series of fictions, plays, treatises, critical performances and autobiography, and Heidegger's hypnotic meditations and textual exegeses. Responses by philosophers, especially Anglo-American ones, seldom take account of the specific literary forms of these works or of their authors’ very self-conscious concern with the problems and strategies of writing. It is true that the texts …

Nietzsche Contra Renan, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

I mean by the title of this essay to allude to Nietzsche Contra Wagner and thereby to suggest the use which Nietzsche made of Renan in formulating some of his most distinctive thoughts. More specifically I suggest that Nietzsche's later view of history, especially as expressed in The Genealogy of Morals and The Antichrist, is a critique and parody of Renan's History of the Origins of Christianity. (I speak deliberately of Nietzsche's "view of history" rather than his "philosophy of history" because the latter phrase contains too many associations which Nietzsche's view rejects.) What is at issue is not a …

Language And Thought: Some Dangerous Distinctions, Ken Badley

Faculty Publications - College of Education

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Language In The Theory Of Communication Of Nicolas Malebranche, Thomas M. Carr Jr.

French Language and Literature Papers

Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) is perhaps the most important French philosopher between Descartes and the Revolution of 1789. His synthesis of Cartesian elements and Augustinianism in the last quarter of the seventeenth century had great influence on several generations of thinkers before the rationalism he represented was replaced by the new Lockian sensualism. There has been a European revival of interest in Malebranche in the last twenty years, centering around the first critical edition of his complete works, a task headed by the Belgian historian of philosophy André Robinet, and there are signs that American interest is growing as well with …

Styling Nietzsche: A Review Essay Of Jacques Derrida Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Any examination of a text by Derrida challenges us to begin with an inquiry into its style. ''The Question of Style" was in fact the originally announced title of this essay which Derrida has since changed to Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (Èperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche). Style is often regarded as a somewhat extraneous aspect of the philosophical enterprise; it is thought to be a variable form or container which may obstruct our comprehension of the matter or spirit of philosophical communication. Now it is well known that Derrida's whole enterprise involves a challenge to the "logocentric" tradition of philosophy according …

Reading And Writing In The Text Of Hobbes's Leviathan, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Critics have often suggested that Hobbes is a paradigm case of a philosopher whose own style of writing violates the norms he sets down for rational discourse. Philosophy, he says, "professedly rejects not only the paint and false colors of language, but even the very ornaments and graces of the same." More specifically he says that metaphors must be "utterly excluded" from "the rigorous search of truth ... seeing they openly professe deceit, to admit them into counsel, or reasoning, were manifested folly.” Nevertheless, attention focuses on his flair for the dramatic or metaphorical, as in the great mise en …