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In the philosophy of language, a proper name – examples include a name of a specific person or place – is a name which ordinarily is taken to uniquely identify its referent in the world. As such it presents particular challenges for theories of meaning, and it has become a central problem in analytic philosophy. The common-sense view was originally formulated by John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic (1843), where he defines it as "a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about but not of telling anything about it". This view was criticized when philosophers applied principles of formal logic to linguistic propositions. Gottlob Frege pointed out that proper names may apply to imaginary or nonexistent entities, without becoming meaningless, and he showed that sometimes more than one proper name may identify the same entity without having the same sense, so that the phrase "Homer believed the morning star was the evening star" could be meaningful and not tautological in spite of the fact that the morning star and the evening star identifies the same referent. This example became known as Frege's puzzle and is a central issue in the theory of proper names.
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length philosophical work by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that was published during his lifetime. The project had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality, and to define the limits of science. Wittgenstein wrote the notes for the Tractatus while he was a soldier during World War I and completed it during a military leave in the summer of 1918. It was originally published in German in 1921 as Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung. In 1922 it was published together with an English translation and a Latin title, which was suggested by G. E. Moore as homage to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670).
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic philosophy, concentrating on the philosophy of language, logic, and mathematics. Though he was largely ignored during his lifetime, Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932), Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), and, to some extent, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) introduced his work to later generations of philosophers. Frege is widely considered to be the greatest logician since Aristotle, and one of the most profound philosophers of mathematics ever.
Classical logic or Frege–Russell logic is the intensively studied and most widely used class of deductive logic. Classical logic has had much influence on analytic philosophy.
Crispin James Garth Wright is a British philosopher, who has written on neo-Fregean (neo-logicist) philosophy of mathematics, Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and on issues related to truth, realism, cognitivism, skepticism, knowledge, and objectivity. He is Professor of Philosophical Research at the University of Stirling, and taught previously at the University of St Andrews, University of Aberdeen, New York University, Princeton University and University of Michigan.
Logical atomism is a philosophical view that originated in the early 20th century with the development of analytic philosophy. It holds that the world consists of ultimate logical "facts" that cannot be broken down any further, each of which can be understood independently of other facts.
Begriffsschrift is a book on logic by Gottlob Frege, published in 1879, and the formal system set out in that book.
In logic, the law of identity states that each thing is identical with itself. It is the first of the historical three laws of thought, along with the law of noncontradiction, and the law of excluded middle. However, few systems of logic are built on just these laws.
The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the early 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy primarily on the relations between language, language users, and the world.
Cora Diamond is an American philosopher who works in the areas of moral philosophy, animal ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy and literature, and the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, and Elizabeth Anscombe. Diamond is the Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Virginia.
Semantic holism is a theory in the philosophy of language to the effect that a certain part of language, be it a term or a complete sentence, can only be understood through its relations to a larger segment of language. There is substantial controversy, however, as to exactly what the larger segment of language in question consists of. In recent years, the debate surrounding semantic holism, which is one among the many forms of holism that are debated and discussed in contemporary philosophy, has tended to centre on the view that the "whole" in question consists of an entire language.
In philosophy—more specifically, in its sub-fields semantics, semiotics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metasemantics—meaning "is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they intend, express, or signify".
The Foundations of Arithmetic is a book by Gottlob Frege, published in 1884, which investigates the philosophical foundations of arithmetic. Frege refutes other idealist and materialist theories of number and develops his own platonist theory of numbers. The Grundlagen also helped to motivate Frege's later works in logicism.
Form of life is a term used sparingly by Ludwig Wittgenstein in posthumously published works Philosophical Investigations, On Certainty and in parts of his Nachlass. Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) was concerned with the structure of language, responding to Frege and Russell. Later, Wittgenstein found the need to revise the view held in TLP as he did not resolve issues concerning elementary propositions. Leading up to a revised view in his PI, still concerned with language, but now focusing on how it is used and not insisting that it has an inherent structure or set of rules. Deriving from this that language comes about as a result of human activity.
This is an index of Wikipedia articles in philosophy of language
This is a list of articles in analytic philosophy.
The picture theory of language, also known as the picture theory of meaning, is a theory of linguistic reference and meaning articulated by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein suggested that a meaningful proposition pictured a state of affairs or atomic fact. Wittgenstein compared the concept of logical pictures with spatial pictures. The picture theory of language is considered a correspondence theory of truth.
Ludwig Wittgenstein considered his chief contribution to be in the philosophy of mathematics, a topic to which he devoted much of his work between 1929 and 1944. As with his philosophy of language, Wittgenstein's views on mathematics evolved from the period of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: with him changing from logicism towards a general anti-foundationalism and constructivism that was not readily accepted by the mathematical community. The success of Wittgenstein's general philosophy has tended to displace the real debates on more technical issues.
In philosophy, Wittgenstein's ladder is a metaphor set out by Ludwig Wittgenstein about learning. In what may be a deliberate reference to Søren Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, the penultimate proposition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus reads:
6.54
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them.
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
Brian McGuinness was a Wittgenstein scholar best known for his translation, with David Pears, of the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, and for his biography of the first half of Wittgenstein's life.
References
- Frege, Gottlob (1884/1980). The Foundations of Arithmetic . Trans. J. L. Austin. Second Revised Edition. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 0-8101-0605-1.
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1921/1922). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . Trans. C. K. Ogden. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. ISBN 0-415-05186-X.
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