Subject collection: Philosophy (254 titles, 1969–2015)

The Ṛgveda is the oldest of the books that comprise the scriptures of Hinduism. While its age cannot be accurately determined, it can be said with reasonable certainty that it must have existed in its present form at least as early as 1000 BC. It consists of 1,028 hymns, arranged, according to the form in which the Ṛgveda has been transmitted, in ten divisions, called maṇḍalas. This volume consists of a selection of hymns, translated into English and annotated, as well as short introductions to the Ṛgveda as a whole and the different themes around which the selected hymns are grouped, a bibliography, and an index.

Wilhelm von Humboldt’s writings on language are a mixture of philosophical theorizing about mind and language on the one hand, and on the other hand, specialized studies of the most detailed sort of both the classical languages and languages which only in Humboldt’s day were becoming known to European scholars, such as Sanskrit, Chinese, and native north and south American languages. This book endeavors to show that Humboldt’s work on language is a coherent system of thought; to recapture and expose the systematic structure of assumption, hypothesis, argument and conclusion; and to assign many of the specific themes in his writing to a place within this structure.

This volume deals with the relation between pragmatics and the philosophy of mind. Unlike most of the books written on the subject, it does not defend the view that a specific form of dependence holds between language and thought, to the exclusion of all other possible relations. Taking pragmatics in its original sense of “that part of semiotics that is concerned with the users of a semiotic system”, the book analyses the nature of the mental processes and states mirrored in language use. Drawing on results from cognitive psychology, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, linguistics, etc., a unified view of the mental dimension in the use of language, both as an instrument of communication and as an instrument of thought, is offered. After offering a tour d’horizon of the relationship between language and mind, this volume deals with the way thought is manifested in language.

Unlike studies which confine psychologism to the second half of the nineteenth century, and to an explicit claim of psychology as a ‘Grundwissenschaft’ during that period, this work attempts to trace psychologism's emergence in Greek antiquity, in hedonistic tendencies of the Renaissance, and in British Empiricism. Thus, psychologism figures as a generic concept, embracing a variety of both positivistic and idealistic arguments concerning the localization of normative sciences, particularly aesthetics and literary theory, in psychological space. This study also considers the implicit psychologism of even those psychoaesthetic theories which claimed to be against the exclusive status of psychology. In their actual treatment of aesthetic and literary facts, such theories inadvertently did indeed resort to psychologistic arguments. The position from which I have chosen to look at psychologistically committed aesthetics and literary theory is essentially phenomenological. The author seeks to present psychologism as a central tendency of psychoaesthetics as well as to assert critically psychologism's basic assumptions.