The Theory of Descriptions 1. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970): Mathematician, Logician, and Philosopher
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Analytic Philosophy and the Fall and Rise of the Kant–Hegel Tradition
Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-87272-0 - Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought Paul Redding Excerpt More information INTRODUCTION: ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE FALL AND RISE OF THE KANT–HEGEL TRADITION Should it come as a surprise when a technical work in the philosophy of language by a prominent analytic philosopher is described as ‘an attempt to usher analytic philosophy from its Kantian to its Hegelian stage’, as has 1 Robert Brandom’s Making It Explicit? It can if one has in mind a certain picture of the relation of analytic philosophy to ‘German idealism’. This particular picture has been called analytic philosophy’s ‘creation myth’, and it was effectively established by Bertrand Russell in his various accounts of 2 the birth of the ‘new philosophy’ around the turn of the twentieth century. It was towards the end of 1898 that Moore and I rebelled against both Kant and Hegel. Moore led the way, but I followed closely in his foot- steps. I think that the first published account of the new philosophy was 1 As does Richard Rorty in his ‘Introduction’ to Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, with introduction by Richard Rorty and study guide by Robert Brandom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 8–9. 2 The phrase is from Steve Gerrard, ‘Desire and Desirability: Bradley, Russell, and Moore Versus Mill’ in W. W. Tait (ed.), Early Analytic Philosophy: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein (Chicago: Open Court, 1997): ‘The core of the myth (which has its origins in Russell’s memories) is that with philosophical argument aided by the new logic, Russell and Moore slew the dragon of British Idealism ...An additional aspect is that the war was mainly fought over two related doctrines of British Idealism ...The first doctrine is an extreme form of holism: abstraction is always falsification. -
Reference and Definite Descriptions1
Philosophical Review !"#"$"%&"'(%)'*"#+%+,"'*"-&$+.,+/%- 01,2/$3-45'6"+,2'78'*/%%"99(% 7/1$&"5':2"';2+9/-/.2+&(9'!"<+"=>'?/98'@A>'B/8'C'3D198>'EFGG4>'..8'HIEJCKL ;1M9+-2")'MN5'*1O"'P%+<"$-+,N';$"--'/%'M"2(9#'/#';2+9/-/.2+&(9'!"<+"= 7,(M9"'P!Q5'http://www.jstor.org/stable/2183143 0&&"--")5'KARKIRHKEK'EA5HC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=duke. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Duke University Press and Philosophical Review are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Philosophical Review. http://www.jstor.org REFERENCE AND DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS1 I DEFINITE descriptions, I shall argue, have two possible func- tions. -
The Meaning of Language
01:615:201 Introduction to Linguistic Theory Adam Szczegielniak The Meaning of Language Copyright in part: Cengage learning The Meaning of Language • When you know a language you know: • When a word is meaningful or meaningless, when a word has two meanings, when two words have the same meaning, and what words refer to (in the real world or imagination) • When a sentence is meaningful or meaningless, when a sentence has two meanings, when two sentences have the same meaning, and whether a sentence is true or false (the truth conditions of the sentence) • Semantics is the study of the meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences – Lexical semantics: the meaning of words and the relationships among words – Phrasal or sentential semantics: the meaning of syntactic units larger than one word Truth • Compositional semantics: formulating semantic rules that build the meaning of a sentence based on the meaning of the words and how they combine – Also known as truth-conditional semantics because the speaker’ s knowledge of truth conditions is central Truth • If you know the meaning of a sentence, you can determine under what conditions it is true or false – You don’ t need to know whether or not a sentence is true or false to understand it, so knowing the meaning of a sentence means knowing under what circumstances it would be true or false • Most sentences are true or false depending on the situation – But some sentences are always true (tautologies) – And some are always false (contradictions) Entailment and Related Notions • Entailment: one sentence entails another if whenever the first sentence is true the second one must be true also Jack swims beautifully. -
David Lewis on Convention
David Lewis on Convention Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone Center for Cognitive Science Rutgers University David Lewis’s landmark Convention starts its exploration of the notion of a convention with a brilliant insight: we need a distinctive social competence to solve coordination problems. Convention, for Lewis, is the canonical form that this social competence takes when it is grounded in agents’ knowledge and experience of one another’s self-consciously flexible behavior. Lewis meant for his theory to describe a wide range of cultural devices we use to act together effectively; but he was particularly concerned in applying this notion to make sense of our knowledge of meaning. In this chapter, we give an overview of Lewis’s theory of convention, and explore its implications for linguistic theory, and especially for problems at the interface of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language. In §1, we discuss Lewis’s understanding of coordination problems, emphasizing how coordination allows for a uniform characterization of practical activity and of signaling in communication. In §2, we introduce Lewis’s account of convention and show how he uses it to make sense of the idea that a linguistic expression can come to be associated with its meaning by a convention. Lewis’s account has come in for a lot of criticism, and we close in §3 by addressing some of the key difficulties in thinking of meaning as conventional in Lewis’s sense. The critical literature on Lewis’s account of convention is much wider than we can fully survey in this chapter, and so we recommend for a discussion of convention as a more general phenomenon Rescorla (2011). -
“Silence Is Your Praise” Maimonides' Approach To
Rabbi Rafael Salber “Silence is your praise” Maimonides’ Approach to Knowing God: An Introduction to Negative Theology Rabbi Rafael Salber The prophet Isaiah tells us, For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways. 73 The content of this verse suggests the inability of mankind to comprehend the knowledge and thoughts of God, as well as the 73 Isaiah 55: 8- 9. The context of the verse is that Isaiah is conveying the message to the people of Israel that the ability to return to God (Teshuvah) is available to them, since the “traits” of God are conducive to this. See Moreh Nevuchim ( The Guide to the Perplexed ) 3:20 and the Sefer haIkkarim Maamar 2, Ch. 3. 65 “Silence is your praise”: Maimonides’ Approach to Knowing God: An Introduction to Negative Theology divergence of “the ways” of God and the ways of man. The extent of this dissimilarity is clarified in the second statement, i.e. that it is not merely a distance in relation, but rather it is as if they are of a different category altogether, like the difference that exists between heaven and earth 74 . What then is the relationship between mankind and God? What does the prophet mean when he describes God as having thoughts and ways; how is it even possible to describe God as having thoughts and ways? These perplexing implications are further compounded when one is introduced to the Magnum Opus of Maimonides 75 , the Mishneh Torah . -
Gottlob Frege Patricia A
Gottlob Frege Patricia A. Blanchette This is the penultimate version of the essay whose final version appears in the Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century German Philosophy, M. Forster and K. Gjesdal (eds), Oxford University Press 2015, pp 207-227 Abstract Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) made significant contributions to both pure mathematics and philosophy. His most important technical contribution, of both mathematical and philosophical significance, is the introduction of a formal system of quantified logic. His work of a more purely- philosophical kind includes the articulation and persuasive defense of anti-psychologism in mathematics and logic, the rigorous pursuit of the thesis that arithmetic is reducible to logic, and the introduction of the distinction between sense and reference in the philosophy of language. Frege’s work has gone on to influence contemporary work across a broad spectrum, including the philosophy of mathematics and logic, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. This essay describes the historical development of Frege’s central views, and the connections between those views. Introduction Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was born on November 8, 1848 in the Hanseatic town of Wismar. He was educated in mathematics at the University of Jena and at the University of Göttingen, from which latter he received his doctorate in 1873. He defended his Habilitation the next year in Jena, and took up a position immediately at the University of Jena. Here he spent his entire academic career, lecturing in mathematics and logic, retiring in 1918. His death came on July 26, 1925 in the nearby town of Bad Kleinen.1 Frege is best known for three significant contributions to philosophy. -
Curriculum Vitae
BAS C. VAN FRAASSEN Curriculum Vitae Last updated 3/6/2019 I. Personal and Academic History .................................................................................................................... 1 List of Degrees Earned ........................................................................................................................................................ 1 Title of Ph.D. Thesis ........................................................................................................................................................... 1 Positions held ..................................................................................................................................................................... 1 Invited lectures and lecture series ........................................................................................................................................ 1 List of Honors, Prizes ......................................................................................................................................................... 4 Research Grants .................................................................................................................................................................. 4 Non-Academic Publications ................................................................................................................................................ 5 II. Professional Activities ................................................................................................................................. -
Bertrand Russell in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia
Russell's philosophical evolution led him into a broad program of research where he applied the resources of mathematical logic to theoreti cal inquiry. In the neorealist and neopositivist stages of Russell's evolution this program led to the formulating of his Theory of Knowledge, and from then on he again recognized the independent significance of philosophical problems. 3 Russell created the concept of logical atomism and he founded logical analysis. Bertrand Russell in the The working out of philosophical questions in mathematics occupies a large place in his works. One of the paradoxes in set theory (Russell's Great Soviet Encyclopedia: Paradox) led him to the formation of the original version of axiomatic set theory4 (see also Theory of Types) and to the consequent attempt at l a translation from Russian reducing mathematics to logic. Russell and Whitehead coauthored the 3 vol ume work "Principia Mathematica" (1910-1913). They systematized and developed the deductive-axiomatic formation of logic (see Logicism). USSELL2 Bertrand (18.5.1872, Trelleck, Wales--2.2.1970, Penrhyndeu Russell developed the original Theory of Descriptions. R draeth, Wales), English philosopher, logician, mathematician, sociolo In his sociological views Russell was close to Psychologism. Accord gist, public figure. Between 1910 and 1916 Russell was a professor at ing to him, at the foundations of the historical process and the behaviour Cambridge University, where he graduated in 1894. He was professor at of people lie instincts, passions. Russell said that from a combination various universities in Great Britain and the U.S. In 1908 he became a of factors determining historical change it is impossible to pick out the member of the Royal Society. -
Philosophical Analysis on the Nature and Forms of Information—From the Perspective of Marxist Philosophy †
Proceedings Philosophical Analysis on the Nature and Forms of Information—From the Perspective of Marxist Philosophy † Mingfang Feng 1 and Liang Feng 2,* 1 School of Economics & Law, Shaanxi University of Technology, No.1, First Eastern Ring Road, Hanzhong 723001, China; [email protected] 2 School of Marxism Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong University, No.28 Xianning West Road, Xi’an 710049, China * Correspondence: [email protected] † Presented at the IS4SI 2017 Summit DIGITALISATION FOR A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY, Gothenburg, Sweden, 12–16 June 2017. Published: 8 June 2017 Abstract: The aim of this research essay attempt to reveal the nature of information form the perspective of Marxist Philosophy. The nature of Information is the first question that philosophy of information science and technology research must be answered, thus the problem is still debated. According to Marxist dialectical materialism method to the essence of information has made the analysis and argumentation, points out the essence of information between what is and its internal contact things, and this contact information is presented. Due to the connection between the protean and endless things, thus produce the endless, full of beautiful things in eyes, each are not identical information. To grasp the nature of information, must pay attention to and the specific form of information and information processing, the reorganization, transmission, storage, use and so on. Keywords: information; nature; connection; philosophy of information 1. Introduction The development of information science and technology has spar ked the nature of information exploration after World War II. The question that ‘What is the nature of information?’ is always unable to avoid in information science and philosophical technology research. -
The Tyranny of Method: a Pragmatic Defense of Philosophical Pluralism
THE TYRANNY OF METHOD: A PRAGMATIC DEFENSE OF PHILOSOPHICAL PLURALISM Vincent M. Colapietro Abstract: The history of philosophy is in no small measure a series of attempts to institute a fail-safe method. In response to what they take to be the scandal of disagreement (disagreement itself being judged as scandalous), a number of historically influential philosophers (e.g., Descartes, Peirce, Husserl, and Carnap) have time and again tried to craft a method for guaranteeing agreement. In light of the failure of these attempts, this tendency might be seen as remotely analogous to what is called in psychoanalytic parlance a “repetition compulsion.” In any event, historical reflections on this repeated tendency promise to be illuminating. But there is a polemical purpose animating these historical reflections. The author tries, in light of these reflections, to render plausible the suggestion that this tendency amounts to a tyranny of method and, in turn, such tyranny results in an inevitable impoverishment of philosophical thought. THE TOPIC of my essay is best brought into focus by recalling a central figure in the history of Western philosophy. 1 This recollection is, however, far from methodologically innocent. My deliberate turn toward a pivotal moment in our intellectual history – in brief, my turn toward history – will provide the basis for my critique of what I am disposed to identify as the tyranny of method. This tyranny is not so much exercised by any particular method as by the repeated impulse to institute a philosophical method of allegedly revolutionary significance. Most often, this impulse is bound up with the hope that philosophy can transform itself into a science (an unquestionable form of certain knowledge) either by adopting the method of science itself (e.g., the efforts of C. -
Puzzles About Descriptive Names Edward Kanterian
Puzzles about descriptive names Edward Kanterian To cite this version: Edward Kanterian. Puzzles about descriptive names. Linguistics and Philosophy, Springer Verlag, 2010, 32 (4), pp.409-428. 10.1007/s10988-010-9066-1. hal-00566732 HAL Id: hal-00566732 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00566732 Submitted on 17 Feb 2011 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Linguist and Philos (2009) 32:409–428 DOI 10.1007/s10988-010-9066-1 RESEARCH ARTICLE Puzzles about descriptive names Edward Kanterian Published online: 17 February 2010 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 Abstract This article explores Gareth Evans’s idea that there are such things as descriptive names, i.e. referring expressions introduced by a definite description which have, unlike ordinary names, a descriptive content. Several ignored semantic and modal aspects of this idea are spelled out, including a hitherto little explored notion of rigidity, super-rigidity. The claim that descriptive names are (rigidified) descriptions, or abbreviations thereof, is rejected. It is then shown that Evans’s theory leads to certain puzzles concerning the referential status of descriptive names and the evaluation of identity statements containing them. -
Brsq 0096.Pdf
/,,-,,,.I (hrir"M/W:|J,„'JJ(// Bulk Mail -:::-``.::`:.1:.t` U.S. Postage ci{08O#altruntr%%ditl.i PAID Permit No. 5659 CfldemmJin, ORE 23307 Alexandria, VA MR. DENNIS J. DARLAND /9999 .1965 WINDING HILLS RD. (1304) DAVENPORT IA 52807 T=..:€,,5fa=.`¥ _ atiTst:.:..¥5 3`=3 13LT„j§jLj;,:j2F,f:Lu,i,:,„„„„3.,§§.i;§„L„;j„§{j;;`„„:i THE BHRTRAND RUSSELL SOCIHTY QUARTERLY Newsletter o the Bertrand Russell Socie November 1997 No. 96 FROM THH EDITOR John Shosky ................................... 3 FROM THE PRESIDHNT John R. Lenz ................................... 4 BERTRAND RUSSELL SOCIETY CONFERENCH: 19-21 JUNE 1998 ...................... RUSSELL NEWS: Publications, etc ....................... 6 RUSSELL'S PLATO David Rodier ................................... 7 A BOOK REVIEW John Shosky .................................. 19 MEMORY COMES AND GOES: A Video Review Cliff Henke ................................... 22 THE GREATER ROCHESTER RUSSELL SET Peter Stone ................................... 24 BERTRAND RUSSELL SOCIETY Membership PI.orlles ............................ 25 BERTRAND RUSSELL SOCIETY 1998 Call for Board Nominations .................. 27 BERTRAND RUSSELL SOCIETY Membership pror]]e Form . 29 1 FROM THE EDITOR BHRTRAND RUSSELL SOCIETY John Shosky 1998 Membership Renewal Form ................... 31 American University Wc beSn this issue with a report from the society president, John Lenz. He will announce the preliminary details of the Annual Bertrand Russell Society Corferencc, which will be held June 19-21 at the Ethics Center of the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. John's report will be followed by "Russell News", which is a column of short blurbs about Russell, works on Russell, society happenings, reports on members, general gossip, and other vital talking points for the informed and discerning society member. In my view, the standard of information one should strive for, in a Platonic sense, is Ken Blackwell, the guru of Russell trivia, realizing that Ken has a considerable head start on all of us.