Goodness Falls

In GOODNESS FALLS, quarterback T.J. Farrell suffers a blow to the head on the final play of the regular season, but with a history of concussions and fearful of a medical benching for the playoffs, T.J. tries desperately to manage the physical, psychological, and emotional symptoms of severe head trauma and to avoid its detection. Set in and around the rural village of Goodness Falls, Ohio, the story is further complicated when T.J.'s best friend and teammate is killed in a freak accident to which T.J. is an inadvertent contributor. To ease the excruciating headaches and to cope with his grief and guilt, T.J. begins stealing and abusing prescription painkillers from his parents' medicine cabinet. Hallucinations begin to haunt him. Violent outbursts of temper and uncharacteristically erratic behavior follow. Both of which endanger his starting position, his hope for a scholarship, his grip on reality, his relationship with his longtime girlfriend, and his life. Goodness Falls confronts the universal themes of love and death as well as a wide range of contemporary issues faced by T.J. and teenagers everywhere, including: the bonds of friendship; sex and dating; undue pressure from adults; and, most significantly, the timely issues of the dangers of sport-induced head injuries and prescription drug abuse.

This book explores graded expressions of modality, a rich and underexplored source of insight into modal semantics. Studies on modal language to date have largely focussed on a small and non-representative subset of expressions, namely modal auxiliaries such as must, might, and ought. Here, Daniel Lassiter argues that we should expand the conversation to include gradable modals such as more likely than, quite possible, and very good. He provides an introduction to qualitative and degree semantics for graded meaning, using the Representational Theory of Measurement to expose the complementarity between these apparently opposed perspectives on gradation. The volume explores and expands the typology of scales among English adjectives and uses the result to shed light on the meanings of a variety of epistemic and deontic modals. It also demonstrates that modality is deeply intertwined with probability and expected value, connecting modal semantics with the cognitive science of uncertainty and choice.

An in-depth history of the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy, from a leading philosopher of language This is the second of five volumes of a definitive history of analytic philosophy from the invention of modern logic in 1879 to the end of the twentieth century. Scott Soames, a leading philosopher of language and historian of analytic philosophy, provides the fullest and most detailed account of the analytic tradition yet published, one that is unmatched in its chronological range, topics covered, and depth of treatment. Focusing on the major milestones and distinguishing them from detours, Soames gives a seminal account of where the analytic tradition has been and where it appears to be heading. Volume 2 provides an intensive account of the new vision in analytical philosophy initiated by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, its assimilation by the Vienna Circle of Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, and the subsequent flowering of logical empiricism. With this “linguistic turn,” philosophical analysis became philosophy itself, and the discipline’s stated aim was transformed from advancing philosophical theories to formalizing, systematizing, and unifying science. In addition to exploring the successes and failures of philosophers who pursued this vision, the book describes how the philosophically minded logicians Kurt Gödel, Alfred Tarski, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing discovered the scope and limits of logic and developed the mathematical theory of computation that ushered in the digital era. The book’s account of this pivotal period closes with a searching examination of the struggle to preserve ethical normativity in a scientific age.