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Two distinguished linguists on language, the history of science, misplaced euphoria, surprising facts, and potentially permanent mysteries. In The Secrets of Words, influential linguist Noam Chomsky and his longtime colleague Andrea Moro have a wide-ranging conversation, touching on such topics as language and linguistics, the history of science, and the relation between language and the brain. Moro draws Chomsky out on today’s misplaced euphoria about artificial intelligence (Chomsky sees “lot...

what makes a property intrinsic? What exactly does the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction rest upon, and how can we reasonably justify this distinction? These questions bear great importance on central debates in such diverse philosophical fields as ethics (What is the nature of intrinsic value?), philosophy of mind (Does mental content supervene on internal bodily features?), epistemology (Can intrinsic duplicates differ in the justification of their beliefs?) and philosophy of science (Do the cau...

"Systematizes and develops in a comprehensive study Nelson Goodman's philosophy of language. The Goodman-Elgin point of view is important and sophisticated, and deals with a number of issues, such as metaphor, ignored by most other theories." --John R. Perry, Stanford University

Peter Baumann develops and defends a distinctive version of epistemic contextualism, the view that the truth conditions or the meaning of knowledge attributions of the form "S knows that p" can vary with the context of the attributor. The first part of the book examines arguments for contextualism and develops Baumann's version. The first chapter deals with the argument from cases and ordinary usage; the following two chapters address "theoretical" arguments, from reliability and from luck. The...

Real Likenesses presents a radical new approach to artistic representation. At its heart is a serious reconsideration of the relationship between medium and content in representational art, which counters currently dominant theories that make attention to the former inevitably a distraction from attending to the latter. Through close analysis of paintings, photographs, and novels, Michael Morris proposes a new understanding of the real likenesses we encounter in representational art; what they a...

Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938-2009) is one of the most important writers and thinkers to emerge from North Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. Though not widely known beyond the Francophone world, Khatibi's critical and creative works speak to the central concerns of postcolonial and postmodern life. Offered here in English for the first time, his long poem from 1976, Le lutteur de classe a la maniere taoiste is a wildly inventive, transgressive, and important text. Class Warrior deli...

This volume tracks Ramsey's philosophical development over the course of his short life, arguing that there runs throughout Ramsey's work a methodological commitment to philosophising in what he called 'the realistic spirit', a commitment which is only given that name by him in 1929, the final year of his life. This commitment is characterised by the rejection of various (though not all) forms of realism, not as false, but as nonsensical. A large part of the book is concerned with characterising...

The assertion that "God is dead" has profoundly affected theories of meaning and underwritten arguments of emptiness and absence in language and form, although it is these arguments of negation in modern poetic and aesthetic movements which make ours a time of the "afterword" or "epilogue" in a radically inventive way. But Steiner asks whether there can be any major literary, artistic or musical creation in the absence of the "rival Maker"? Does not the experience of a work of art wager on the s...