Philosophy and Ordinary Language

Philosophy and Ordinary Language
Author: Oswald Hanfling
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2013-01-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1134352131

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What is philosophy about and what are its methods? Philosophy and Ordinary Language is a defence of the view that philosophy is largely about questions of language, which to a large extent means ordinary language. Some people argue that if philosophy is about ordinary language, then it is necessarily less deep and difficult than it is usually taken to be but Oswald Hanfling shows us that this isn't true. Hanfling, a leading expert in the development of analytic philosophy, covers a wide range of topics, including scepticism and the definition of knowledge, free will, empiricism, folk psychology, ordinary versus artificial logic, and philosophy versus science. Drawing on philosophers such as Austin, Wittgenstein, and Quine, this book explores the nature of ordinary language in philosophy.

Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy

Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy
Author: Sandra Laugier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2023-11-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 022682957X

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Now in paperback, Sandra Laugier's reconsideration of analytic philosophy and ordinary language. Sandra Laugier has long been a key liaison between American and European philosophical thought, responsible for bringing American philosophers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Stanley Cavell to French readers—but until now her books have never been published in English. Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy rights that wrong with a topic perfect for English-language readers: the idea of analytic philosophy. Focused on clarity and logical argument, analytic philosophy has dominated the discipline in the United States, Australia, and Britain over the past one hundred years, and it is often seen as a unified, coherent, and inevitable advancement. Laugier questions this assumption, rethinking the very grounds that drove analytic philosophy to develop and uncovering its inherent tensions and confusions. Drawing on J. L. Austin and the later works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, she argues for the solution provided by ordinary language philosophy—a philosophy that trusts and utilizes the everyday use of language and the clarity of meaning it provides—and in doing so offers a major contribution to the philosophy of language and twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy as a whole.

When Words Are Called For

When Words Are Called For
Author: Avner Baz
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2012-03-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0674068483

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A new form of philosophizing known as ordinary language philosophy took root in England after the Second World War, promising a fresh start and a way out of long-standing dead-end philosophical debates. Pioneered by Wittgenstein, Austin, and others, OLP is now widely rumored, within mainstream analytic philosophy, to have been seriously discredited, and consequently its perspective is ignored. Avner Baz begs to differ. In When Words Are Called For, he shows how the prevailing arguments against OLP collapse under close scrutiny. All of them, he claims, presuppose one version or another of the very conception of word-meaning that OLP calls into question and takes to be responsible for many traditional philosophical difficulties. Worse, analytic philosophy itself has suffered as a result of its failure to take OLP’s perspective seriously. Baz blames a neglect of OLP’s insights for seemingly irresolvable disputes over the methodological relevance of “intuitions” in philosophy and for misunderstandings between contextualists and anti-contextualists (or “invariantists”) in epistemology. Baz goes on to explore the deep affinities between Kant’s work and OLP and suggests ways that OLP could be applied to other philosophically troublesome concepts. When Words Are Called For defends OLP not as a doctrine but as a form of practice that might provide a viable alternative to work currently carried out within mainstream analytic philosophy. Accordingly, Baz does not merely argue for OLP but, all the more convincingly, practices it in this eye-opening book.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology
Author: Herman Cappelen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 769
Release: 2016
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199668779

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This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology (including logical empiricism, phenomenology, and ordinary language philosophy). The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience.

Revolution of the Ordinary

Revolution of the Ordinary
Author: Toril Moi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2017-05-22
Genre: Education
ISBN: 022646444X

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This radically original book argues for the power of ordinary language philosophy—a tradition inaugurated by Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and extended by Stanley Cavell—to transform literary studies. In engaging and lucid prose, Toril Moi demonstrates this philosophy’s unique ability to lay bare the connections between words and the world, dispel the notion of literature as a monolithic concept, and teach readers how to learn from a literary text. Moi first introduces Wittgenstein’s vision of language and theory, which refuses to reduce language to a matter of naming or representation, considers theory’s desire for generality doomed to failure, and brings out the philosophical power of the particular case. Contrasting ordinary language philosophy with dominant strands of Saussurean and post-Saussurean thought, she highlights the former’s originality, critical power, and potential for creative use. Finally, she challenges the belief that good critics always read below the surface, proposing instead an innovative view of texts as expression and action, and of reading as an act of acknowledgment. Intervening in cutting-edge debates while bringing Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell to new readers, Revolution of the Ordinary will appeal beyond literary studies to anyone looking for a philosophically serious account of why words matter.

Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary

Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary
Author: Niklas Forsberg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2021-10-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1000468534

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This book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of J.L. Austin’s philosophy. It opens new ways of thinking about ethics and other contemporary issues in the wake of Austin’s philosophical work. Austin is primarily viewed as a philosopher of language whose work focused on the pragmatic aspects of speech. His work on ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory is seen as his main contribution to philosophy. This book challenges this received view to show that Austin used his most well-known theoretical notions as heuristic tools aimed at debunking the fact/value dichotomy. Additionally, it demonstrates that Austin’s continual returns to the ordinary is rooted in a desire to show that our lives in language are complicated and multifaceted. What emerges is an attempt to think with Austin about problems that are central to philosophy today—such as the question about linguistic inheritance, truth, the relationship between a language inherited and morality, and how we are to cope with linguistic elasticity and historicity. Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on Austin’s philosophy, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy.

Metaphysics in Ordinary Language

Metaphysics in Ordinary Language
Author: Stanley Rosen
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780300150469

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In this rich collection of philosophical writings, Stanley Rosen addresses a wide range of topics-from eros, poetry, and freedom to problems like negation and the epistemological status of sense perception. Though diverse in subject, Rosen’s essays share two unifying principles: there can be no legitimate separation of textual hermeneutics from philosophical analysis, and philosophical investigation must be oriented in terms of everyday language and experience, although it cannot simply remain within these confines. Ordinary experience provides a minimal criterion for the assessment of extraordinary discourses, Rosen argues, and without such a criterion we would have no basis for evaluating conflicting discourses: philosophy would give way to poetry.Philosophical problems are not so deeply embedded in a specific historical context that they cannot be restated in terms as valid for us today as they were for those who formulated them, the author maintains. Rosen shows that the history of philosophy-a story of conflicting interpretations of human life and the structure of intelligibility-is a story that comes to life only when it is rethought in terms of the philosophical problems of our own personal and historical situation.

Language Lost and Found

Language Lost and Found
Author: Niklas Forsberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2013-09-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1623569737

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Language Lost and Found takes as its starting-point Iris Murdoch's claim that "we have suffered a general loss of concepts." By means of a thorough reading of Iris Murdoch's philosophy in the light of this difficulty, it offers a detailed examination of the problem of linguistic community and the roots of the thought that some philosophical problems arise due to our having lost the sense of our own language. But it is also a call for a radical reconsideration of how philosophy and literature relate to each other on a general level and in Murdoch's authorship in particular.

First Word Philosophy

First Word Philosophy
Author: Richard Fleming
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2004
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780838755686

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Ordinary language philosophy, explains Fleming (philosophy, Bucknell U.), proposes that analysts articulate the conditions of restraint of particular uses of language, and identify the implications those uses make possible. Discussions of language analyzed and problems solved, it holds, should be deferred until after the specific language that people actually use is understood. He sets out the principles, methods, and findings of the approach. Distributed by Associated University Presses. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Bertrand Russell, Language and Linguistic Theory

Bertrand Russell, Language and Linguistic Theory
Author: Keith Green
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2007-11-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1441180338

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Although there has been a significant revival in interest in Bertrand Russell's work in recent years, most professional philosophers would still argue that Russell was not interested in language. Here, in the first full-length study of Russell's work on language throughout his long career, Keith Green shows that this is in fact not the case. In examining Russell's work, particularly from 1900 to 1950, Green exposes a repeated emphasis on, and turn to, linguistic considerations. Green considers how 'linguistics' and 'philosophy' were struggling in the twentieth century to define themselves and to create appropriate contemporary disciplines. They had much in common during certain periods, yet seemed to continue in almost total ignorance of one another. This negative relation has been noted in the past by Roy Harris, whose work provides some of the inspiration for the present book. Taking those two aspects, Green's aim here is to provide the first full-length consideration of Russell's varied work in language, and to read it in the context of developing contemporary (i.e. with Russell's work) linguistic theory. The main aims of this important new book, in focusing exclusively on Russell's work on language throughout his career, are to place Russell within the changing contexts of contemporary linguistic thought; to read Russell's language-theories against the grain of his own linguistic practice; to assess the relationship between linguistic and philosophical thought during Russell's career, and to reassess his place in the history of linguistic thought in the twentieth century. As such, this fascinating study will make a vital contribution to Russell studies and to the study of the relationship between philosophy and linguistics.