Publisher Description

Reprint of the original, first published in 1838.

The focus of this volume is the crisis of the traditional view of the relationship between words and things and the emergence of linguistic arbitrarism in 17th-century British philosophy. Different groups of sources are explored: philological and antiquarian writings, pedagogical treatises, debates on the respective merits of the liberal and mechanical arts, essays on cryptography and the art of gestures, polemical pamphlets on university reform, universal language scheme, and philosophical analyses of the conduct of the understanding. In the late 17th-century the philosophy of mind discards both the correspondence of predicamental series to reality and the archetypal metaphysics underpinning it. This is a turning point in semantic theory: language is conceived as the social construction of historical-conventional objects through signs and the study of strategies we use to bridge the gap between the privacy of experience and the publicness of speech emerges as one of the main topics in the philosophy of language.

Explores the stable core of Wittgenstein's philosophy as developed from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations.

This book explores the interrelated concepts of representation and grammar in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Throughout his life, Wittgenstein was obsessed with the problem of the nature of language and the relationship between language and the world. His intellectual journey, one of the most compelling in twentieth century thought, is the detailed adventure told by Gordon Hunnings in The World and Language in Wittgenstein's Philosophy. This book surveys Wittgenstein's elucidation of how the world is represented in language, including the posthumously published material of his middle period. Early in his career, Wittgenstein's answer to the problem explored the representational connection between language and the world through the analogy of propositions as logical pictures of facts. Later, his mature answer elucidated the concept of the world as a construction of logical grammar. Hunnings shows how these shifting images of reality reflected in language also mirror the changes in Wittgenstein's philosophy.

The nature of method has always been a topic at the very heart of western philosophical traditions, especially in the 20th century. One of the most influential philosophers of the last century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, changed not just his philosophical standpoint at least twice in his lifetime, but the very method of studying philosophy as well. A Custodian of Grammar discusses Wittgenstein's method in his later period, sometimes referred to as morphology. Krkac explores this topic from the primer of morphology and proceeds to more demanding and complicated topics, such as forms of life and perspicuous presentations. He also examines Wittgenstein's applications of his method, namely to consciousness, perception, and certainty. This book will be of interest to Wittgenstein scholars and to students investigating various philosophical methods of philosophy from the 20th century.