First Published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This collection of papers presents different views on metaphor in communication. The overall aim is to show that the communicative dimension of metaphor cannot be reduced to its conceptual and/or linguistic dimension. The volume addresses two main questions: does the communicative dimension of metaphor have specific features that differentiate it from its linguistic and cognitive dimensions? And how could these specific properties of communication change our understanding of the linguistic and cognitive dimensions of metaphor? The authors of the papers collected in this volume offer answers to these questions that raise new interests in metaphor and communication.

Scientific evidence for the origin of speech is abundant, but evidence for the origin of language as separate from speech as a naming system remains speculative. What evidence can be utilized that will furnish relevant insights on the origin or language? This book attempts to provide an answer by suggesting that the first riddles of humanity, along with the first myths, reveal that language may have emerged as a mode of reflection via metaphor—a mode that involves blending speech forms together to produce complex, abstract cognition.

It is timely for researchers to approach metaphor as social and situated, as a matter of language and discourse, and not just as a matter of thought. Over the last twenty five years, scholars have come to appreciate in depth the cognitive, motivated and embodied nature of metaphor, but have tended to background the linguistic form of metaphor and have largely ignored how this connects to its role in the discourses in which our lives are constructed and lived. This book brings language and social dimensions into the picture, offering snapshots of metaphor use in real language and in real lives across the very different cultures of Europe and Brazil and contributing to the theorizing of metaphor in discourse.

Pirandello is known for his plays, but his narrative production hasn't enjoyed the same degree of attention. This study represents a reassessment of this output, including the "realist" novels, the historical novel "I vecchi e i giovani" and the autobiographical "Suo marito".

Contemporary discussions of problems of selfhood and knowledge have offered a wide range of solutions, from calls for a new Enlightenment (in the face of the resurgence of myth and the irrational), to attempts to 're-enchant the world' (in the face of the growth of an impersonal instrumental Reason). In Between Vision and Obedience - Rethinking Theological Epistemology, George Ille offers a theological response to these competing views, with the specific purpose of evaluating the present state of epistemological rationality in theology. Ille anchors his concerns historically and thematically through the work of the philosophers Paul Ricouer and G.F.W. Hegel. Invoking theological insights from Eastern and Western philosophies, and seeking recourse to a number of philosophers and theologians from both the continental and analytical traditions, he traces the contours of a theological rationality freed from both modern and post-modern hermeneutical anxieties. He proposes a rationality that follows the drama of God's engagement with the world through dying and resurrection, ascesis and abundance, suffering witness and eucharistic communion. This important text challenges and reframes existing theological and philosophical engagements with hermeneutics and epistemology. The new critical perspective it offers will be an invaluable resource for academics and scholars across the humanities.

In Metaphors in Proverbs, Rotasperti offers a contribution to the understanding of metaphorical language in Proverbs by decoding some metaphors.

The topic of the sublime is making a return to contemporary discourse on aesthetics and cognition. In Sublime Understanding, Kirk Pillow makes sublimity the center of an alternative conception of aesthetic response and interpretation. He draws an aesthetics of sublimity from Kant's Critique of Judgment, bolsters it with help from Hegel, and establishes its place in a broadened conception of human understanding (thus differing from the many scholars who use Hegel to dismiss Kant or vice versa). He argues that sublime reflection provides a model for an interpretive response to the uncanny Other outside our conceptual grasp; it advances our sense-making pursuits but eschews unified, conceptual determination. Thus "sublime understanding" is the always partial, indeterminate grasping of contextual wholes through which we make sense of the uncanny particular in both art and the lived world. The book is divided into three parts. In the first two parts, Pillow presents insightful reinterpretations of Kant's and Hegel's aesthetics. In the third part he develops his own model of an aestheticized understanding, which illuminates contemporary discussions of metaphor and interpretation, while bridging Anglo-American and continental treatments of these issues. The presentation is a model of clear and well-crafted exposition, exemplifying the practice of aesthetically reflective sublime understanding that it articulates.