This volume presents a highly focused collection of articles by Donnellan. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the philosophy of language and mind went through a paradigm shift, with the then-dominant Fregean theory losing ground to the 'direct reference' theory sometimes referred to as the direct reference revolution. Donnellan played a key role in this shift, focusing on the relation of semantic reference, a touchstone in the philosophy of language and the relation of 'thinking about' - a touchstone in the philosophy of mind.
Saul Kripke, in a series of classic writings of the 1960s and 1970s, changed the face of metaphysics and philosophy of language. Christopher Hughes offers a careful exposition and critical analysis of Kripke's central ideas about names, necessity, and identity. He clears up some common misunderstandings of Kripke's views on rigid designation, causality and reference, the necessary and the contingent, the a posteriori and the a priori. Through his engagement with Kripke's ideas Hughes makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates on, inter alia, the semantics of natural kind terms, the nature of natural kinds, the essentiality of origin and constitution, the relative merits of 'identitarian' and counterpart-theoretic accounts of modality, and the identity or otherwise of mental types and tokens with physical types and tokens. No specialist knowledge in either the philosophy of language or metaphysics is presupposed; Hughes's book will be valuable for anyone working on the ideas which Kripke made famous in the philosophy world.
If there is such a thing as essential reading in metaphysics or in philosophy of language, this is it. Ever since the publication of its original version, Naming and Necessity has had great and increasing influence. It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural and metaphysical necessity and to the connections between these and theories of reference, in particular of naming, and of identity. From a critique of the dominant tendency to assimilate names to descriptions and more generally to treat their reference as a function of their Fregean sense, surprisingly deep and widespread consequences may be drawn. The largely discredited distinction between accidental and essential properties, both of individual things (including people) and of kinds of things, is revived. So is a consequent view of science as what seeks out the essences of natural kinds. Traditional objections to such views are dealt with by sharpening distinctions between epistemic and metaphysical necessity; in particular by the startling admission of necessary a posteriori truths. From these, in particular from identity statements using rigid designators whether of things or of kinds, further remarkable consequences are drawn for the natures of things, of people, and of kinds; strong objections follow, for example to identity versions of materialism as a theory of the mind. This seminal work, to which today's thriving essentialist metaphysics largely owes its impetus, is here published with a substantial new Preface by the author.
Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language was first published in 1983. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This volume, an expanded edition of the philosophy of language issue of the journal Midwest Studies in Philosophy (1977), includes essays by some of the foremost exponents of the most influential current approaches to the philosophy of language. There are new contributions to this edition by Keith S. Donnellan, Jerrold J. Katz, Barbara Partee, John Searle, Richmond Thomason and Zeno Vendler. Essays drawn from the original edition are by W. V. Quine, Keith S Donnellan, Stephen Schiffer, Donnis W. Stampe, Baruch A Brody, Panayot Butchvarov, Fred I. Dretske, Jaegwon Kim, David Shwayder, J. O. Urmson, Michael Levin, David E. Cooper, John Wallace, Hector-Neri Castaneda, Howard K Wettstein, Herbert Hochberg, Nelson Goodman, Wilfrid Sellars, Michael Root, Bruce Aune, Donald Davidson, and Saul Kripke. Of special interest in the original edition was Kripke's paper "Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference, Descriptions, and Anaphora," Presents a rebuttal to Kripke's essay and attempts to establish referential attributive distinction as semantically significant.
No words in English are shorter than "I" and few, if any, play a more fundamental role in language and thought. In Understanding "I": Thought and Language José Luis Bermúdez continues his longstanding work on the self and self-consciousness. Bermúdez develops a model of how language-users understand sentences involving the first person pronoun "I". This model illuminates the unique psychological role that self-conscious thoughts (typically expressed using "I") play in action and thought - a unique role often summarized by describing "I" as an essential indexical. The book opens with an argument directly supporting the indispensability of "I"-thoughts in explaining action. After motivating a broadly Fregean approach linguistic understanding it critically examines Frege's own remarks on "I" as well as the Fregean account offered by Gareth Evans. The main part of the book develops an account of the sense of "I" that explains a cluster of related phenomena, including essential indexicality, immunity to error through misidentification, the shareability of "I"-thoughts, the relation between "I" and "you", and the role of autobiographical memory in self-consciousness.
This is the third volume in Alvin Plantinga's trilogy on the notion of warrant, which he defines as that which distinguishes knowledge from true belief. In this volume, Plantinga examines warrant's role in theistic belief, tackling the questions of whether it is rational, reasonable, justifiable, and warranted to accept Christian belief and whether there is something epistemically unacceptable in doing so. He contends that Christian beliefs are warranted to the extent that they are formed by properly functioning cognitive faculties, thus, insofar as they are warranted, Christian beliefs are knowledge if they are true.
The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion features fourteen new essays written by some of the most prominent philosophers working in the field. Contributors include Linda Zabzeski, Hugh McCann, Brian Leftow, Gareth B. Matthews, William L. Rowe, Elliott Sober, Derk Pereboom, Alfred J. Freddoso, William P. Alston, William J. Wainwright, Peter van Inwagen, Philip Kitcher and Philip Quinn. Features fourteen newly commissioned essays. Provides a comprehensive treatment of the major problems in the philosophy of religion. Surveys the field and presents distinctive arguments.
