The Reality Of Meaning The Meaning Of Reality

Traditionally, philosophers held that expressions are meaningful which have a mental entity and sentences are true when their meaning corresponds to reality. Wittgenstein is most often read by contemporary philosophers to reject both theses: meanings cannot constrain use of language, and reference to external reality is inconceivable. Zemach is influenced by Wittgenstein as well, but demonstrates the error of a relativistic interpretation of his work, especially when Wittgenstein's later work on the philosophy of psychology is fully considered. Combining his interpretation of Wittgenstein as a mentalist with the use of Substance Logic, and the idea that meanings and their referents are tokens of the same type, Zemach restores the traditional view. The Reality of Meaning presents a clear survey of the major issues in contemporary philosophy of language. A lively, good-humored philosophical argument that is informative, topical, and well seasoned with common sense, it is a book for all readers of philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.

This book collects some of McDowell’s most influential papers of the last two decades. The essays deal with themes such as the interpretation of Aristotle’s and Plato’s ethical writings, questions in moral philosophy that arise out of the Greek tradition, Wittengensteinian ideas about reason in action, and issues central to philosophy of mind.

This is the second volume of John McDowell's selected papers. These 19 essays collectively report on McDowell's involvement with questions about the interface between the philosophies of language and mind and with issues in general epistemology.

This work challenges the notion that anxiety and depression amount to a mental illness denoting that something is wrong with the individual sufferer. Instead, anxiety and depression are described as perfectly rational responses to difficulties in the sufferer's world, experienced subjectively by that person. An essential contrast is drawn between objective conceptions of normality (what reality ought to be as per commercial and other objectifying sources) and the reality of the individual's subjective experience of the world (abuse, unemployment, and so on). Chapters include tackling the myth of normality; examining shyness; and analysing the way in which assumptions behind the use of language can foster anxiety and depression. The book's primary purpose is to explain the meaning of anxiety as experienced by the sufferer. These insights also lead to a view, by way of secondary purpose, that the role of the therapist is not in 'curing' the individual, but rather to negotiate demystification and to provide insight into the effects of the problems in the sufferer's world, based on the sufferer and the therapist's shared subjective understanding.

A watershed event in the field of sociology, this text introduced “a major breakthrough in the sociology of knowledge and sociological theory generally” (George Simpson, American Sociological Review). In this seminal book, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann examine how knowledge forms and how it is preserved and altered within a society. Unlike earlier theorists and philosophers, Berger and Luckmann go beyond intellectual history and focus on commonsense, everyday knowledge—the proverbs, morals, values, and beliefs shared among ordinary people. When first published in 1966, this systematic, theoretical treatise introduced the term social construction,effectively creating a new thought and transforming Western philosophy.

Lcc number: 2005048394

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