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Richard Rorty (1931 - 2007) ist einer der wichtigsten Denker des 20. Jahrhunderts und der Gegenwart. Als bekannter Vertreter der analytischen Philosophie wurde er zu einem ihrer scharfsinnigsten Kritiker. Rorty hat damit maßgeblich zur Renaissance der amerikanischen Philosophie des Pragmatismus beigetragen. Seine ethisch-politisch motivierte Neuinterpretation des Pragmatismus nach dem linguistic turn macht ihm zum bedeutendsten und zugleich umstrittensten Vertreter des Neopragmatismus.Dieses Handbuch deckt systematisch und umfassend die ganze Breite von Rortys Denken ab, insbesondere auch die politische Philosophie. In sechs umfangreichen Teilen werden alle wichtigen Aspekte seines Lebens und seines Werks behandelt. Die Beiträge internationaler und führender Expertinnen und Experten führen in seine Version des Pragmatismus ein und treiben zugleich die Rorty-Forschung weiter voran. Das Handbuch ist ein unverzichtbares Hilfsmittel für alle, die sich mit Richard Rorty beschäftigen.

Ludwig Wittgenstein ist zweifellos einer der bedeutendsten und einflussreichsten Philosophen des 20. Jahrhunderts – und das, obwohl er zu Lebzeiten kaum etwas veröffentlicht hat. Bis heute wirken der Stil seines Philosophierens und seine Radikalität auf viele philosophisch außerordentlich inspirierend. Hinzu kommt das Schillernde seiner von Anekdoten umrankten Persönlichkeit, die in etlichen biographischen Werken aufgearbeitet wurde. Stefan Majetschak gibt einen konzisen Überblick über Leben und Gesamtwerk dieser Jahrhundertfigur und spürt ihren Wirkungen nach.

Dass Naturmetaphern seit 1750 die politischen Diskurse verstärkt auch in Deutschland bestimmten und die geschichtlichen Vorgänge charakterisierten, ist mittlerweile hinreichend bekannt. Dennoch, und das wurde bisher weitgehend vernachlässigt, war in solchen Metaphern immer auch ein bestimmtes Verständnis von Natur präsent. Sie bewirkten nicht nur eine Meisterung geschichtlicher Problemlagen, sondern politische Blitz-, Erdbeben- und Kometenmetaphern dienten dazu, die als bedrohlich empfundenen Elemente selbst zu bezwingen. Im Sinne einer »historischen Semantik« und mit reichem Zugriff auf neue aussagekräftige Quellen arbeitet der Autor entsprechende metaphorische Verschiebungen vom Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts heraus. Eingebettet in einen mentalitätsgeschichtlichen Ansatz zeigt sich: Die im 18. Jahrhundert verbreitete Ästhetisierung der Natur weicht politisierenden Aneignungsmustern, welche die unberechenbaren natürlichen Elemente noch offensiver in einen menschlichen Verfügungsraum ziehen.

Containing three previously unpublished papers by W.V. Quine as well as historical, exegetical, and critical papers by several leading Quine scholars including Hylton, Ebbs, and Ben-Menahem, this volume aims to remedy the comparative lack of historical investigation of Quine and his philosophical context.

Looking at the work of J.L. Austin, who subjected language to a close and intense analysis, this book deals with his examination of the various things we do with words, and with the philosophical insights he believed could be gained by closely examining the uses of words by non-philosophers.

This book is a historical investigation of the leading philosophical movement in England in the twentieth century. In seven chapters, the intellectual development of the most prominent representatives of analytic philosophy-Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein in Cambridge, and Ryle, Austin, Strawson and Dummett in Oxford-is traced. The book does not aim, however, at delivering a story. This means, above all, that generalisations and conclusions are reduced to a minimum-an approach adopted in an endeavour to avert the danger of subjectivism that interpreting the philosophers under scrutiny would impose. My hope is that by following this aproach, my inves­ tigation will stimulate readers to make their own generalisations and conclusions on the basis of the objectively presented data. Instead, my aim is to articulate a flawless, comprehensive description of the phil­ osophical texts of the seven most significant analytic philosophers in England in the twentieth century. For this purpose, all their articles and books have been sifted through in order to pick out the most representative parts. For obvious reasons, only the chapters on Russell and Wittgenstein, and-to a lesser extent-the chapter on Moore, are more theoretical.

Analytic philosophy has been a dominant intellectual movement in the 20th century and a reflection of the cultural pre-eminence of scientism. In response to analytic philosophy's peculiar reticence (and inability) to discuss itself, this book provides its first comprehensive history and critique. The central element in the analytic conversation has been the Enlightenment Project: the appeal to an autonomous human reason, freed of any higher authority and channeling itself through science as its privileged tool. This centrality is demonstrated by systematically examining its presence and development in the philosophy of science, metaphysics, epistemology, language, psychology, social science, ethics, political philosophy, and the history of philosophy. This journey highlights the internal logical disintegration of that project. Post-modern relativism is its natural offspring and not a viable alternative. The Enlightenment Project's conception of physical science is defective; this defective conception of physical science renders the analytic conception of social science, philosophical psychology, and epistemology defective; and that defective conception of the human condition leads to defective conceptions of both moral and political philosophy, specifically the idea of social engineering or social technology. Throughout the book, an alternative conception of philosophy is presented as a way out of the abyss of analysis, an alternative that reconnects philosophy with the mainstream of Western civilization and initiates the process of providing a coherent cultural narrative. This book will be of particular interest to any sophisticated reader concerned about the lack of a coherent cultural narrative.

IF WITI'GENSTEIN COULD TALK, COULD WE UNDERSTAND HIM? Perusing the secondary literature on Wittgenstein, I have frequently experienced a perfect Brechtean Entfremdungseffekt. This is interesting, I have felt like saying when reading books and papers on Wittgenstein, but who is the writer talking about? Certainly not Ludwig Wittgenstein the actual person who wrote his books and notebooks and whom I happened to meet. Why is there this strange gap between the ideas of the actual philosopher and the musings of his interpreters? Wittgenstein is talking to us through the posthumous publication of his writings. Why don't philosophers understand what he is saying? A partial reason is outlined in the first essay of this volume. Wittgenstein was far too impatient to explain in his books and book drafts what his problems were, what it was that he was trying to get clear about. He was even too impatient to explain in full his earlier solutions, often merely referring to them casually as it were ina shorthand notation. For one important instance, in The Brown Book, Wittgenstein had explained in some detail what name-object relationships amount to in his view. There he offers both an explanation of what his problem is and an account of his own view illustrated by means of specific examples of language-games. But when he raises the same question again in Philosophical Investigations I, sec.

In The Natural Background to Meaning Denkel argues that meaning in language is an outcome of the evolutionary development of forms of animal communication, and explains this process by naturalising the Locke-Grice approach. The roots of meaning are contained in observable regularities, which are manifestations of objective connections such as essences and causal relations. Denkel's particularistic ontology of properties and causation leads to a view of time that harmonises B-theory with transience. Time's passage, he argues, is a necessary condition of communication and meaning. The book connects some central topics in the philosophies of language, science and ontology, treating them within the framework of a single theory. It will interest not only professional philosophers doing research on meaning, universals, causation and time, but also students, who can consult it as a textbook examining Grice's theory of meaning.

How is linguistic theory related to linguistic practice? What do theoretical notions and models tell us about real-life language use? Are there any limits to what such notions and models can reasonably be taken to accomplish? These questions are fundamental to any serious investigation into the phenomena of human communication. The essays in this book show that philosophers and linguists of quite different brands have tended to give undue priority to their own favourite theoretical framework, and have presupposed that the descriptive scheme invoked by that framework constitutes a pattern to which any linguistic practice somehow has to conform. What unites the contributors to this volume is a critical attitude towards such essentialist aspirations. By investigating several concrete examples of this tendency - examples collected from such seemingly disparate areas as structuralism, contemporary analytic philosophy and feminist epistemology - the authors collectively manage to cast doubt on the very attempt to fit the whole of linguistic practice into a general theoretical mould.

Andrea Bottani Massimiliano Carrara Pierdaniele Giaretta What do we do when we do metaphysics? The aim of this introduction is to give a provisional answer to this question, and then to explain the subtitle of the volume. It is easy to observe that when we do meta­ physics we engage in a linguistic activity, mainly consisting of uttering declarative sentences that are not very clear to most people. That is true, but, of course, it is not very informative. What do we speak of when we do metaphysics? A traditional answer could be: we speak of what things really are, so suggesting that things can appear in a way that is different from the way they really are. So understood, meta­ physics is about the sense, or the senses, of'real being'. A question that immediately arises is whether the sense of being is unique or is different for different types of things. Another question is whether it is possible that something could appear to be, but really not be. Modem analytic metaphysicians usually answer that the sense of being is unique, while acknowledging that there are different kinds of things, and that to say that something could appear to be but really not be is a plain contradiction, unless what is understood is that it could appear to us that there is something having such and such features, but viii Individuals, Essence, and Identity really there is no such a thing.

The question how to turn the principles implicitly governing the concept of truth into an explicit definition (or explication) of the concept hence coalesced with the question how to get a finite grip on the infinity of T-sentences. Tarski's famous and ingenious move was to introduce a new concept, satisfaction, which could be, on the one hand, recursively defined, and which, on the other hand, straightforwardly yielded an explication of truth. A surprising'by-product'of Tarski's effort to bring truth under control was the breathtaking finding that truth is in a precisely defined sense ineffable, that no non­ trivial language can contain a truth-predicate which would be adequate for the very 4 language. This implied that truth (and consequently semantic concepts to which truth appeared to be reducible) proved itself to be strangely'language-dependent': we can have a concept of truth-in-L for any language L, but we cannot have a concept of truth applicable to every language. In a sense, this means, as Quine (1969, p. 68) put it, that truth belongs to'transcendental metaphysics', and Tarski's'scientific'investigations seem to lead us back towards a surprising proximity of some more traditional philosophical views on truth. 3. TARSKI'S THEORY AS A PARADIGM So far Tarski himself. Subsequent philosophers then had to find out what his considerations of the concept of truth really mean and what are their consequences; and this now seems to be an almost interminable task.

Many articles and books dealing with Donald Davidson's philosophy are dedicated to the papers and ideas Davidson put forward in the `sixties and `seventies. In the last two decades, however, Davidson has continued to work in many areas of philosophy, offering new contributions, many of which are highly regarded by philosophers working in the fields concerned. For instance, Davidson has considerably developed his ideas about interpretation, theory of meaning, irreducibility of the mental, causation, and action theory; he has proposed an innovative externalist conception of the mental content and a new analysis of the concept of truth; and he has partly modified his theses about event, and the supervenience of the mental on the physical. In Interpretations and Causes, some of the leading contemporary analytic philosophers discuss Davidson's new ideas in a lively, relevant, useful, and not always entirely sympathetic way. Davidson himself offers and original contribution.

Wittgenstein was a faithful and passionate reader of Plato's Dialogues as confirmed by writings and witnesses. Here well-known scholars of Wittgenstein and Plato illuminate the relationship between the two philosophers both philologically and philosophically, and provide new interpretation keys of two of the leading figures of Western thought.

(Over)Interpreting Wittgenstein will be read by philosophers investigating Wittgenstein and by scholars, interpreters, students, and specialists, in both analytic and continental philosophy. It will intrigue readers interested in issues of interpretation and cultural studies. This book tells the story - as yet untold - of Wittgenstein interpretation during the past eighty years. It provides different interpretations, chronologies, developments, and controversies. It aims to discover the (socio-cultural rather than psychological) motives and motivations behind the philosophical community's project of interpreting Wittgenstein. As a cultural history of ideas, it traces the parallelism between Wittgenstein interpretation and the move from metaphysics, to language, to postmodernism effected in the twentieth century.

The aim of this series is to inform both professional philosophers and a larger readership (of social and natural scientists, methodologists, mathematicians, students, teachers, publishers, etc.) about what is going on, who's who, and who does what in contemporary philosophy and logic. PROFILES is designed to present the research activity and the results of already outstanding personalities and schools and of newly emerging ones in the various fields of philosophy and logic. There are many Festschrift volumes dedicated to various philosophers. There is the celebrated Library of Living Philosophers edited by P. A. Schilpp whose format influenced the present enterprise. Still they can only cover very little of the contemporary philosophical scene. Faced with a tremendous expansion of philosophical information and with an almost frightening division of labor and increasing specialization we need systematic and regular ways of keeping track of what happens in the profession. PROFILES is intended to perform such a function. Each volume is devoted to one or several philosophers whose views and results are presented and discussed. The profiled philosopher(s) will summarize and review his (their) own work in the main fields of significant contribution. This work will be discussed and evaluated by invited contributors. Relevant his to rial and/or biographical data, an up-to-date bibliography with short abstracts of the most important works and, whenever possible, references to significant reviews and discussion will also be included.

One of the first things to strike the reader of Wittgenstein's writings is the unique power of his style. One immediately notices the intriguing and arrangement of the paragraphs in Philosophical Investi­ composition gations, or the stark assertiveness of the sentences in the Tractatus Logico­ Philosophicus. A sense of the singular style being employed is unavoidable, even before the reader understands anything of what is happening philos­ ophically. Perhaps precisely for this reason it is too often assumed that coming to understand either work has little or nothing to do with re­ sponding to its form. The unusual style is a mere curiousity decorating the vehicle of Wittgenstein's ideas. Form is assigned a purely incidental import, there is a coincidence of this or that rhetorical flair with the yet to be determined content of the thoughts. The remarkableness of the style is perhaps registered in a tidy obiter dictum standing beside the more arduous task of discovering the substance of the ideas being presented. our interest, or at Wittgenstein's peculiar way of writing ably captures least our attention, but it bears only minor philosophical import. Though not unprecedented as a form of philosophical composition, it does not conform to the currently acceptable conventions; hence Wittgenstein's style is often thought to stand in the way of understanding his meaning. Such assumptions can be harmless for certain types of writing; however it does not appear as though Wittgenstein's is one of these.

RUSSELL AND THE LINGUISTIC PHILOSOPHY I t is generally acknowledged that Bertrand Russell played a vital role in the so-called'revolution'that has taken place in twentieth century Anglo-American philosophy, the revolution that has led many philo­ sophers virtually to equate philosophy with some variety - or varieties - of linguistic analysis. His contributions to this revolution were two­ fold: (I) together with G. E. Moore he led the successful revolt against the neo-Hegelianism of Idealists such as Bradley and McTaggert; (2) again with Moore he provided much of the impetus for a somewhat revolutionary way of doing philosophy. (I) and (2) are, of course, close­ ly related, since the new way of philosophizing could be said to consti­ tute, in large part, the revolt against Idealism. Be this as it may, how­ ever, the important fact for present consideration is that Russell was a major influence in turning Anglo-American philosophy in the direction it has subsequently taken - toward what may be termed, quite general­ ly, the'linguistic philosophy.'Unfortunately, though his importance as a precursor of the linguistic philosophy is well-known, the precise sense in which Russell himself can be considered a'philosopher of language'has not, to the present time, been sufficiently clarified. Useful beginnings have been made toward an investigation of this question, but they have been, withal, only begin­ nings, and nothing like an adequate picture of Russell's overall philoso­ phy of language is presently available.

The present publication is a continuation of two earlier series of chronicles, Philosophy in the Mid-Century (Firenze 1958/59) and Contemporary Philosophy (Firenze 1968), edited by Raymond KJibansky. As with the earlier series the present chronicles purport to give a survey of significant trends in contemporary philosophi­ cal discussion. The time space covered by the present series is (approximately) 1966-1978. The need for such surveys has, I believe, increased rather than decreased over the last years. The philosophical scene appears, for various reasons, more complex than ever before. The continuing process of specialization in most branches, the emergence of new schools of thought, particularly in philosophical logic and the philosophy of language, the convergence of interest (though not necessarily of opinion) of different traditions upon certain prob­ lems, and the increasing attention being paid to the history of philosophy in discussions of contemporary problems are the most important contributory factors. Surveys of the present kind are a valuable source of knowledge of this complexity and may as such be an assistance in renewing the understanding of one's own philosophical problems. The surveys, it is to be hoped, may also help to strengthen the Socratic element of modem philosophy, the dialogue or Kommu nikationsgemeinschajt. So far, four volumes have been prepared for the new series. The present chronicles in the Philosophy of Language and Philosophi­ cal Logic (Vol. I), are followed by chronicles in the Philosophy of Science (Vol. II), and Philosophy of Action (Vol.

“The more narrowly we examine language, the sharper becomes the con?ict - tween it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation; it was a requirement.) The con?ict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty. —We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk; so we need 1 friction. Back to the rough ground!” —Ludwig Wittgenstein This manuscript consists of four related parts: a brief overview of Wittgenstein's p- losophy of language and its relevance to information systems; a detailed explanation of Wittgenstein's late philosophy of language and mind; an extended discussion of the re- vance of his philosophy to understanding some of the problems inherent in information systems, especially those systems which rely on retrieval based on some representation of the intellectual content of that information. And, fourthly, a series of detailed footnotes which cite the sources of the numerous quotations and provide some discussion of the related issues that the text inspires. The?rst three of these parts can each be read by itself with some pro?t, although they are related and do form a conceptual whole.