James Conant

About this book Hilary Whitehall Putnam was one of the leading philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. As student of Rudolph Carnap's and Hans Reichenbach's, he went on to become not only a major figure in North American analytic philosophy, who made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind, language, mathematics, and physics but also to the disciplines of logic, number theory, and computer science. He passed away on March 13, 2016. The present volume is a memorial to his extraordinary intellectual contributions, honoring his contributions as a philosopher, a thinker, and a public intellectual. It features essays by an international team of leading philosophers, covering all aspects of Hilary Putnam's philosophy from his work in ethics and the history of philosophy to his contributions to the philosophy of science, logic, and mathematics. Each essay is an original contribution. Author information James Conant, Univ. of Chicago/Univ. of Leipzig, USA/Germany; Sanjit Chakraborty, IISER Kolkata/VIT-AP University, India.

The past few decades have seen considerable interest in the history of analytic philosophy. As this field has developed, complex and provocative questions have emerged about the very nature of analytic philosophy, challenging long- standing assumptions and spawning new research paradigms. In this outstanding collection an international team of contributors examine these questions and contribute to these debates, exploring the idea of analysis, the essence and status of logic, the nature of the proposition and its linguistic expression, the logical act of judgment, the distinction between external and internal relations, the possibility of category mistakes, and the demarcation of sense from nonsense. Several of the chapters shed light on the interconnections between Wittgenstein and other figures within that tradition, including Frege, Russell, Ramsey, and Ryle. Other chapters examine the interaction between analytic philosophers and members of other philosophical traditions, including Frege and Weierstrass, Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein and Bradley, Russell and the North American Pragmatists, Russell and the Neo-Kantians, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and Heidegger and Ryle. Among the specific topics explored are Russell’s conception of the judging subject, Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following, Frege’s conception of the logical categories, and Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense. The volume also includes a book review by Gilbert Ryle – collected and published non-anonymously here for the first time – which sheds important light on the reception of Frege’s philosophy in the analytic tradition. Early Analytic Philosophy: Origins and Transformations will be of great interest to those studying and researching the history of twentieth-century philosophy, contemporary analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of language and logic.

In this paper I will sketch three different ways of reading Austin. In order to have some bit of Austin before us to show that it can be and has been read in each of these three different ways, let us begin with a characteristic passage from Austin. In A Plea for Excuses, Austin writes: Modification without aberration. When it is stated that X did A, there is a temptation to suppose that given some, indeed perhaps any, expression modifying the verb we shall be entitled to insert either it or its opposite or negation in our statement: that is, we shall be entitled to ask, typically, “Did X do Mly or not Mly?” (“Did X murder Y voluntarily or involuntarily”), and to answer one or the other. Or as a minimum it is supposed that if X did A there must be at least one modifying expression that we could, justifiably and informatively, insert with the verb. In the great majority of the cases of the use of the great majority of verbs (“murder” perhaps is not one of the majority) such suppositions are quite unjustified. The natural economy of language dictates that for the standard case covered by any normal verb—not, perhaps, a verb of omen such as “murder”, but a verb like “eat” or “kick” or “croquet” – no modifying expression is required or even permissible. Only if we do the action named in some special way or circumstances, different from those in which such an act is naturally done (and of course both the normal and the abnormal differ according to what verb is in question) is a modifying expression called for or even in order. I sit in my chair, in the usual way – I am not in a daze or influenced by threats or the like: here, it will not do to say either that I sat in it intentionally or that I did not sit in it intentionally, nor yet that I sat in it automatically or from habit or what you will..