Philosophy of Language

The basic conceptual ground of the course offered is the theory of meaning, as developed primarily within the tradition of analytic philosophy. The presentation follows the historical development of the philosophy of language, from semantic and uniform universalistic to pragmatic and contextualist standpoints. The course tackles the basic concepts of the philosophy of language: meaning and truth, reference and description, name and demonstrative: through logicist (Frege, Russell, early Wittgenstein, Carnap…) strand and through the strand of “ordinary language philosophy” (late Wittgenstein, Austin, Strawson, arguably Dummett…) as well as through the criticism of the theory of meaning (Quine). The course analyses the general nature of language and its specific contents: translation and interpretation, propositional attitudes, metaphor (e.g. Davidson et al), the causal theory of names (Kripke, Evans) … The course tackles, both explicitly and implicitly, the relations between language, thought and reality.