The book's two essays, 'Limited Inc.' and 'Signature Event Context, ' constitute key statements of the Derridean theory of deconstruction. They are perhaps the clearest exposition to be found of Derrida's most controversial idea.

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This handsome new edition of Stanley Cavell's landmark text, first published 20 years ago, provides a new preface that discusses the reception and influence of his work, which occupies a unique niche between philosophy and literary studies.

Publisher's description: The realistic spirit, a nonmetaphysical approach to philosophical thought concerned with the character of philosophy itself, informs all of the discussions in these essays by philosopher Cora Diamond. Diamond explains Wittgenstein's notoriously elusive later writings, explores the background to his thought in the work of Frege, and discusses ethics in a way that reflects his influence. Diamond's new reading of Wittgenstein challenges currently accepted interpretations and shows what it means to look without mythology at the coherence, commitments, and (...) connections that are distinctive of the mind. (shrink)

This text offers major re-evaluation of Wittgenstein's thinking. It is a collection of essays that presents a significantly different portrait of Wittgenstein. The essays clarify Wittgenstein's modes of philosophical criticism and shed light on the relation between his thought and different philosophical traditions and areas of human concern. With essays by Stanley Cavell, James Conant, Cora Diamond, Peter Winch and Hilary Putnam, we see the emergence of a new way of understanding Wittgenstein's thought. This is a controversial collection, with essays (...) by highly regarded Wittgenstein scholars that may change the way we look at Wittgenstein's body of work. (shrink)

This book uses the philosophy of Wittgenstein as a perspective from which to challenge the idea of a critical social theory, represented pre-eminently by Giddens, Habermas and Bhaskar.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This study examines the relationship between thought and language by considering the views of Kant and the later Wittgenstein along with many strands of contemporary debate in the area of mental content. Building on an analysis of the nature of concepts and conceptions of objects, Gillett provides an account of psychological explanation and the subject of experience, offers a novel perspective on mental representation and linguistic meaning, looks at the difficult topics of cognitive roles and singular thought, and concludes with (...) an outline of certain considerations relevant to skeptical arguments and the nature of perception. The resulting synthesis demonstrates interesting correlations with current work in cognitive and developmental psychology, and is directly relevant to continuing work in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophical psychology. (shrink)

The first edition of The Mind and its Discontents was a powerful analysis of how, as a society, we view mental illness, looking beyond just biological models of mental pathologies. In the ten years since, there has been growing interest in the philosophy of psychiatry, and a new edition of this text is more timely and important than ever.

Recent books by Paul Johnston, D. Z. Phillips, Philip Shields, and B. R. Tilghman all depict Wittgenstein as centrally concerned with ethics, but they range from representing his main works as expressing and advocating a particular religious-ethical outlook to arguing that his work has no ethical content but aims primarily to clarify such logical distinctions as that between ethical and empirical judgments. All four books raise the question about the moral philosopher's proper role, and each suggests a rather different answer. (...) Via the discussion of these books, I argue that Wittgenstein's stress on diversity in the ways of human life, his notion of conceptual grammar, the idea of a perspicuous representation, his lifelong involvement with art and his suggestions about its connection with morality, and his preoccupation with aspect-seeing-all suggest new possibilities of rehabilitating the historically recurrent idea that the philosopher may be a moral sage. (shrink)

The received understanding of Winch’s critique of social science is that he propounded a radically relativist, anti-explanatory and a-critical conception of the legitimate task of ‘social studies’. This conception is presumed to be predicated upon an extension of Wittgenstein’s critique of philosophy. I argue, against this view, that Winch reads Wittgenstein through a Kantian framework, and that in fact he advanced a rigorously essentialist and universalist picture of ‘social phenomena’. It is Winch’s underlying Kantian metaphysics that has made his ideas (...) attractive to contemporary architects of critical social theory, such as Giddens and Habermas. However, in opposition to the latter, and in spite of his Kantianism, I discern in Winch a genuinely critical attitude towards social understanding. (shrink)

According to Wittgenstein, philosophical puzzles are due to deep prejudices about language. In this collection of essays, in honour of Rush Rhees, philosophers investigate the hold such prejudices have on us in a number of closely related areas of philosophical enquiry.

Louis Sass disputes that schizophrenia can be understood successfully according to the hitherto dominant models--for much of what schizophrenics say and do is neither regressive (as psychoanalysis claims) nor just faulty reasoning (as "cognitivists" claim). Sass argues instead that schizophrenics frequently exhibit hyper-rationality, much as philosophers do. He holds that schizophrenic language can after all be interpreted--if we hear it as Wittgenstein hears solipsistic language. I counter first that broadly Winchian considerations undermine both the hermeneutic conception of interpreting other humans (...) in general and Sass's hope of interpreting schizophrenics in particular. I then go on to argue that even if these Winchian considerations are not accepted, Sass in any case doesn't take sufficiently seriously Wittgenstein's use of nonsense as a term of criticism. Solipsism is not something we can understand so as to be able to understand analogically the schizophrenic's "world"--for there is no such thing as understanding it. Solipsism is nonsense, is nothing--there is no "world" there, in solipsists (as I show by reference to Cora Diamond's reading of Wittgenstein). Nor in any actually analogous cases of schizophrenia. Their "alienness" is the alienness of nothingness; roughly, of the fantasy of "logically alien thought". (shrink)

What is the number one? How do we know that 2+2=4? These apparently simple questions are in fact notoriously difficult to answer, and in one form or other have occupied philosophers from ancient times to the present. Gottlob Frege's conviction that the truths of arithmetic, and mathematics more generally, are derived from self-evident logical truths formed the basis of a systematic project which revolutionized logic, and founded modern analytic philosophy. In this accessible and stimulating introduction, Joan Weiner traces the development (...) of Frege's thought from his invention of a powerful new logical language in Begriffsschrift, through his explication of his project in the Foundations of Arithmetic and famous papers such as 'On Sense and Reference', to the brilliant, but ultimately doomed, presentation of the system in Basic Laws of Arithmetic. At each stage, she discusses Frege's motivations in a way which enables the modern reader to appreciate the originality, clarity, and profundity of his thought. Past Masters is a series of concise, lucid, authoritative introducitons to the thought of leading intellectual figures of the past whose ideas still influence the way we think today. (shrink)

I: Winch’s emphasis on philosophy’s concern with language and on rule-following; II: Winch’s misgivings about limits of analogy between rules and language; III: Rhees’ comparison of the unity of discourse with conversation, and claim that language makes sense if living makes sense; IV: Winch’s later emphasis on the fragility of conditions for understanding both between cultures and within our own.

In 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs' Donald Davidson attacks a picture of language which, he says, is prevalent among philosophers and linguists. Davidson's criticism, even if correct, is not radical enough. The common irregularities of everyday language, such as malapropisms, nicknames, and slips of the tongue, not only imply that linguistic meanings are not governed by conventions that are learned in advance of occasions of interpretation, but undermine the very idea that linguistic meaning can be accounted for in terms of (...) systematic meaning-theories. Davidson continues to hold that Tarskian truth-definitions should play a central role in philosophical accounts of language, but if the goal is to describe rather than to improve or otherwise change language, we must give up the aspiration towards theoretical systematicity altogether. In this connection, Davidson's approach is compared with those of Quine and Wittgenstein. It is argued that Davidson's unwillingness to give up the notion that meaning is systematic is best explained in terms of his vacillating between treating meaning-theories as mere representations of the linguistic abilities of a speaker and seeing them as playing a more substantial role in communication. (shrink)

A psychoanalyst is said to provide the real explanation of a person's behaviour; an explanation which the person has arrived at with the help of a psychoanalyst. The person was not aware of the real character of his behaviour. It may have exhibited unconscious thoughts, beliefs, motives, intentions and emotions. In his paper ‘The Unconscious’, in Mind 1959, Ilham Dilman says, ‘What those who talked of “Freud's discovery of the unconscious” had in mind is a group of innovations which “the (...) founder of psycho-analysis” brought to bear on the study of the human mind’. I have ten questions concerning the relation of this ‘group of innovations’ to human behaviour. (shrink)

In European philosophical psychology, the work of Jacques Lacan has exerted a great deal of influence but it has received little attention from analytic philosophers. He is famous for the view that the unconscious is a repository of influences arising from language and the meanings it captures, but the presentation of his ideas is sometimes perplexing and impenetrable and its conceptual links with analytic philosophers like Frege and Wittgenstein are not easily discerned. In fact, there are a number of such (...) links and they are worth pursuing for those interested in language, mind, and the unconscious. If we explore Lacan's claim about the link between signification and the tuchè (the encounter with the real) we find that the mental content of the subject is essentially tied to the external world both causally and linguistically. The means of tying the two together arise in the context of human interactions and therefore are charged with personal and emotive content as well as the semantic content with which we are normally concerned in philosophy of language. When we pursue the implications of his view it becomes plausible both that the unconscious is structured like a language and that language borrows much of its meaning and significance to a subject from the interpersonal medium through which it has been inscribed on that subject. His approach is therefore illuminating both for linguistics (especially psycholinguistics) and for the psychology of the unconscious. (shrink)