Piotr Stalmaszczyk

The philosophy of language is central to the concerns of those working across semantics, pragmatics and cognition, as well as the philosophy of mind and ideas. Bringing together an international team of leading scholars, this handbook provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary investigations into the relationship between language, philosophy, and linguistics. Chapters are grouped into thematic areas and cover a wide range of topics, from key philosophical notions, such as meaning, truth, reference, names and propositions, to characteristics of the most recent research in the field, including logicality of language, vagueness in natural language, value judgments, slurs, deception, proximization in discourse, argumentation theory and linguistic relativity. It also includes chapters that explore selected linguistic theories and their philosophical implications, providing a much-needed interdisciplinary perspective. Showcasing the cutting-edge in research in the field, this book is essential reading for philosophers interested in language and linguistics, and linguists interested in philosophical analyses.

Studies collected in this volume investigate selected issues in contemporary philosophy of language and philosophy of literature. Individual authors concentrate on philosophy of fiction and discuss fictional worlds and fictional characters. They also present different approaches to translation theory, and metaphor theory. Other chapters address the issues of figurativeness and poetic language, apply the principles of cognitive poetics to analyse different types of texts, and provide cognitive approaches to abstraction in visual and verbal art, also to the categories of similarity and difference in perception and language. The analysed authors include Wallace Stevens, Rae Armantrout, Ernest Hemingway and David Lodge.

This book investigates philosophical and formal approaches to predication. The topics discussed include Aristotelian predication, a conceptualist approach to predication, possible formalizations of the notion, Fregean predicates and concepts, and Meinongian predication. The contributions discuss the approaches proposed by Aristotle and Frege, as well as the division of classes into a hierarchy of orders. They reanalyze the traditional notions, and offer new insights into predication theory. This book contributes to contemporary debates on predication and predicates in the philosophy of language.

The papers in this collection discuss broadly understood cognitive turns in the philosophy of language, inspired by the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics, Langacker's and Lakoff's Cognitive Linguistics, but also phenomenology, Relevance Theory and Classical Indian Philosophy. The individual texts investigate, from different angles, the relations between philosophy of language and linguistics, and contribute to the development of theoretical frameworks for studying language. Most of the contributions were presented at the first International Conference on Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, PhiLang2009 (University of Łodź, May 2009)."

The articles in this collection focus on philosophical approaches to proper names. The issues discussed include abstract names, empty names, naming and name-using practices, definite descriptions, individuals, reference, designation, sense and semantics. The contributions show the importance and lasting influence of theories proposed by John Stuart Mill, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Donald Davidson, and Saul Kripke. Individual chapters assess traditional analyses and modern controversies, and contribute to the debate on proper names in contemporary philosophy of language.