Howard Wettstein

This addition to the Midwest Studies in Philosophy series comprises the most recent volume on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to date. Here 16 philosophers explore both the challenges Wittgenstein presented to philosophy as well as the responses to those challenges from such noted thinkers as Kripke. By addressing various questions raised by Wittgenstein's work, these original essays aim to illuminate in one way or another the impact Wittgenstein's legacy has had on 20th-century philosophy.

The nature of reference, or the relation of a word to the object to which it refers, has been perhaps the dominant concern of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Extremely influential arguments by Gottlob Frege around the turn of the century convinced the large majority of philosophers that the meaning of a word must be distinguished from its referent, the former only providing some kind of direction for reaching the latter. In the last twenty years, this Fregean orthodoxy has been vigorously challenged by those who argue that certain important kinds of words, at least, refer directly without need of an intermediate meaning or sense. The essays in this volume record how a long-term study of Frege has persuaded the author that Frege's pivotal distinction between sense and reference, and his attendant philosophical views about language and thought, are unsatisfactory. Frege's perspective, he argues, imposes a distinctive way of thinking about semantics, specifically about the centrality of cognitive significance puzzles for semantics. Freed from Frege's perspective, we will no longer find it natural to think about semantics in this way.

In this volume leading contemporary philosophical historians of the Renaissance and Early Modern periods examine the works of important figures of the fifteenth through the eighteenth century. While Midwest Studies in Philosophy has produced other volumes devoted to historical periods in philosophy, this is the first to offer such extensive and focused original materials on specific crucial figures as this volume. Original papers by twenty contemporary philosophers writing about the works of the major philosophers of the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth centuries This historically and philosophically broad collection extends from such fifteenth century figures as Ficino, Machiavelli, and Pompanazzi to the work of Montesquieu in the eighteenth century.

I have long felt that graduate education in philosophy, when successful, produces in its beneficiaries a strong antipathy, almost an allergic reaction, to “ism” words. “Naturalism,” nevertheless, is not one that is easy to eschew. This is not because of anything like a widely shared or especially intuitive doctrine associated with the term. The numerous doctrines offered by way of characterization often seem either suspicious because of their strength, or else platitudinous, too easy and not sufficiently restrictive. The appeal of naturalism is rather a matter of a tendency of thought, a powerful one despite its lack of easy definition.

The American Philosophers contains papers by current leading philosophers and political theorists that explore the work of the major American philosophers from the colonial period to the present, from Jonathan Edwards to David Kaplan. Contains a philosophically and historically broad exploration of the major schools of American philosophy Examines both the pragmatists and the later Twentieth Century analytic philosophers, as well as such shapers of the political and philosophical American scene as Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Emerson, and Jane Addams.

I argue that theological doctrine, the output of philosophical theology, is not a natural tool for thinking about biblical/rabbinic Judaism. Fundamental to my argument is the claim that there is a tension between constellations of theological doctrine of medieval vintage and the primary religious literature---the Hebrew Bible as understood through, and supplemented by, the Rabbis of the Talmud. This tension is a product of the genesis of philosophical theology, the application of Greek philosophical thought to a very different tradition, one that emerged from a very different world

Analytic philosophy was born from philosophic reflection on logic and mathematics. It has been at its strongest in these and related domains of reflection, domains that are friendly to definition and analytic clarity. From time to time, analytic philosophers, some very distinguished, have produced fine work on literature and the arts. But these areas remain underexplored in the analytic tradition. This volume is focused upon language that does not fit within the usual analytic paradigms. It's highlights include two pieces of original poetry on philosophic subjects (by philosophers who are also published poets), and philosophic reflection on poetry, literature more generally, metaphor, and related subjects.

Wittgenstein speaks of the fog that surrounds the workings of language. Our ways of thinking about reference contribute generously to the fog. While a full discussion would constitute a book-length project, my aims here are quite limited. I want to have a look at the idea that reference is a relation between a piece of language and a piece of reality. The idea might seem unexceptional and unexceptionable; names, for example, name things, and “relation” seems just right. But there is casual relation-talk, and then more serious talk of a genuine relation, one that requires the existence, in every case, of a referent. Referential expressions, I’ll argue, sometimes lack such a relatum, and other timeswhen in some straightforward way there is such a thingit’s quite difficult to know what we are talking about.