This book is a systematic and historical exploration of the philosophical significance of grammar. In the first half of the twentieth century, and in particular in the writings of Frege, Husserl, Russell, Carnap and Wittgenstein, there was sustained philosophical reflection on the nature of grammar, and on the relevance of grammar to metaphysics, logic and science.

This book presents a collection of authoritative contributions on the concept of time in early twentieth-century philosophy. It is structured in the form of a thematic atlas: each section is accompanied by relevant elementary logic maps that reproduce in a “spatial” form the directionalities (arguments and/or discourses) reported on in the text. The book is divided into three main sections, the first of which covers phenomenology and the perception of time by analyzing the works of Bergson, Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida. The second section focuses on the language and conceptualization of time, examining the works of Cassirer, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Lacan, Ricoeur and Foucault, while the last section addresses the science and logic of time as they appear in the works of Guillaume, Einstein, Reichenbach, Prigogine and Barbour. The purpose of the book is threefold: to provide readers with a comprehensive overview of the concept of time in early twentieth-century philosophy; to show how conceptual reasoning can be supported by accompanying linguistic and spatial representations; and to stimulate novel research in the humanistic field concerning the complex role of graphic representations in the comprehension of concepts.

In the early twentieth century, an apparently obscure philosophical debate took place between F.H. Bradley and Bertrand Russell. The outcome was momentous: the demise of British Idealism and the rise of analytic philosophy. Stewart Candlish examines afresh this formative period in twentieth-cenutry thought and comes to some surprising conclusions.

A study of the relation of metaphysics to grammar, placing the central topics of philosophy in an entirely new light.

The original (1985) edition of this work attempted to cover the main lines of development of phonological theory from the end of the 19th century through the early 1980s. Much work of importance, both theoretical and historiographic, has appeared in subsequent years, and the present edition tries to bring the story up to the end of the 20th century, as the title promised. This has involved an overall editing of the text, in the process correcting some errors of fact and interpretation, as well as the addition of new material and many new references.

Anschließend an den 2017 herausgegebenen Sammelband widmet sich auch der vorliegende zweite Teil der Geschichte des Problems der Kategorien. Das Ziel besteht nach wie vor darin, einige Trajektorien und Perspektiven dieser Geschichte zu beschreiben, ohne einen erschöpfenden Überblick darüber geben zu können. Vielmehr soll ein Beitrag zu einem umfangreichen Projekt geleistet werden, das allmählich sein Ziel erreicht. In diesem Band wurde das Problem der Kategorien bei weiteren Philosophen, von Platon bis Quine, untersucht; die vorliegende Arbeit bildet dadurch eine Ergänzung zum ersten Teilband. Auf unterschiedlichen Wegen werden einzelne Fragen und Umstände behandelt, die Kategorien werden in verschiedenen Zeiten und Kontexten ausgeleuchtet, wobei die Frage nach ihnen manchmal in den Vordergrund tritt und sich manchmal selbst verbirgt. Themen, die bis dahin ihre zentrale Stellung verloren hatten, wird mehr oder neue Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt. ********* This is the second volume devoted to the history of the question of categories, an issue which was also the focus of the collective volume published in 2017. The aim is still to describe some trajectories and perspectives of this history, without claiming an exhaustive overview of it, but rather representing a contribution to a wider project, which is gradually reaching its goal. In this volume the problem of categories has been investigated in the work of further philosophers, from Plato to Quine; in this way the present work complements that done in the first volume. The question of categories has been dealt with in different times and contexts, sometimes coming into the foreground and sometimes concealing itself—and this is something worthy of investigation in itself. It is also interesting to understand why in particular contexts greater attention is paid to a particular issue that had previously lost its centrality.

This book examines the various philosophical influences contained in the ancient description of the noun. According to the traditional view, grammar adopted its philosophical categories in the second century B.C. and continued to make use of precisely the same concepts for over six hundred years, that is, until the time of Priscian (ca. 500). The standard view is questioned in this study, which investigates in detail the philosophy contained in Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae. This investigation reveals a distinctly Platonic element in Priscian’s grammar, which has not been recognised in linguistic historiography. Thus, grammar manifestly interacted with philosophy in Late Antiquity. This discovery led to the reconsideration of the origin of all the philosophical categories of the noun. Since the authenticity of the Techne, which was attributed to Dionysius Thrax, is now regarded as uncertain, it is possible to speculate that the semantic categories are derived from Late Antiquity.

In 1933 Ludwig Wittgenstein revised a manuscript he had compiled from his 1930-1932 notebooks, but the work as a whole was not published until 1969, as Philosophische Grammatik. This first English translation clearly reveals the central place Philosophical Grammar occupies in Wittgenstein's thought and provides a link from his earlier philosophy to his later views.

John McDowell's 'minimal empiricism' is one of the most influential and widely discussed doctrines in contemporary philosophy. Richard Gaskin subjects it to careful examination and criticism. The doctrine is undermined, he argues, by inadequacies in the way McDowell conceives what he styles the 'order of justification' connecting world, experience, and judgement. McDowell’s conception of the roles played by causation and nature in this order is threatened with vacuity; and the requirements of self-consciousness and verbal articulacy which he places on subjects participating in the justificatory relation between experience and judgement are unwarranted, and have the implausible consequence that infants and non-human animals are excluded from the 'order of justification' and so are deprived of experience of the world. Above all, McDowell's position is vitiated by a substantial error he commits in the philosophy of language: following ancient tradition rather than Frege's radical departure from that tradition, he locates concepts at the level of sense rather than at the level of reference in the semantical hierarchy. This error generates an unwanted Kantian transcendental idealism which in effect delivers a reductio ad absurdum of McDowell's metaphysical economy. Gaskin goes on to show how to correct the mistake, and thereby presents his own version of empiricism. First we must follow Frege in his location of concepts at the level of reference, but then we must go beyond Frege and locate not only concepts but also propositions at that level; and this in turn requires us to take seriously an idea which McDowell mentions only to reject, that of objects as speaking to us 'in the world's own language'. If empiricism is to have any chance of success it must be still more minimal in its pretensions than McDowell allows: in particular, it must abandon the individualistic and intellectualistic construction which McDowell places on the 'order of justification'.