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

This study focuses on the uses of the grammatical concept of etymologia in primarily Latin writings from the early Middle Ages. Etymologia is a fundamental procedure and discursive strategy in the philosophy and analysis of language in early medieval Latin grammar, as well as in Biblical exegesis, encyclopedic writing, theology, and philosophy. Read through the frame of poststructuralist analysis of discourse and the philosophy of science, the procedure of the ars grammatica are interpreted as overlapping genres (commentary, glossary, encyclopedia, exegesis) which use different verbal or extraverbal criteria to explain the origins and significations of words and which establish different epistemological frames within which an etymological account of language is situated. The study also includes many translations of heretofore untranslated passages from Latin grammatical and exegetical writings.

It has often been claimed that the aim of semiotics is to establish a general theory of systems of signification. However, as Jean-Claude Coquet notes in a recent collection of essays, what distinguishes one school of semiotics from another is the initial definition given of sign. If, for certain semioticians, the sign is first of all an observable phenomenon, for the Paris School it is first of all a construct and this point of departure has crucial theoretical and practical consequences. The essays appearing in these two volumes are representative of recent work carried out by members of this semiotic school. Essays in Volume I study problems more closely related to theoretical issues, while Volume II focuses more specifically on various fields of application.

Ekstein's book brings together papers on a number of themes which have occupied his thinking during the last 40 years. In the Wiener Kreis, the Vienna circle of philosophers, he studied, together with his professor Moritz Schlick, the philosophy of science, the analysis of language, and the clarification of meaning. Throughout his life he has always been inspired by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute his interest in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis was reinforced, and he established for himself a bridge between the kind of thinking that looks for philosophical clarification and that which searches for psychological meaning. The psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic methods of psychological clarification depend on the language tools of the thinking process. But these language tools, referring now to different theories of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in the various schools, have their usefulness as well as their limitations. Ekstein's chronological assessment allows us to arrive at a philosophical and psychological clarification of present psycho-therapeutic and psychoanalytic schools.

The great diversity of contexts in which the term Postmodernism is currently encountered reflects the remarkable success of a coinage that has been in circulation for only about forty years. It has been used by philosophers, sociologists, art critics and literary historians to become, finally, a household word in the language of advertising and politics. Before letting it fade to a derelict cliché, an attempt is made in this volume of essays to use its potential as a cultural concept for the analysis and understanding of contemporary literature and thought.

In all disciplines there are specifiable basic concepts, our universes of discourse, which define special areas of inquiry. Semiotics is that ‘science of sciences’ which inquires into all processes of inquiry, and which seeks to discover methods of inquiry. Peirce held that semiotics was to be the method of methods. An account of semiotic method should distinguish between the way the term ‘sign’ is used in semiotics and the various ways this term was meant in nearly all the traditional disciplines. In this monograph Roberta Kevelson minutely explores Charles S. Peirce’s method of methods.

Although Richard Gätschenberger can be regarded as one of the important sign theorists in the first third of the 20^th century, nothing much about the man and his works is currently known. Long before there was a widespread philosophical interest in language, Gätschenberger had already laid the foundations of a semiotic turn although the linguistic turn had not even happened; but his role as a pioneer is one reason for the comparatively small response to his sematology. This volume contains a facsimile reprint of the Regensburger 1901 edition of Richard Gätschenberger’s dissertation Grundzüge einer Psychologie des Zeichens, and is preceded by a preface ‘Sematology as a Basic Science’ by Achim Eschbach.

The basic question of this monograph is: how should we go about judging arguments to be reasonable or unreasonable? Our concern will be with argument in a broad sense, with realistic arguments in natural language. The basic object will be to engage in a normative study of determining what factors, standards, or procedures should be adopted or appealed to in evaluating an argument as “good,” “not-so-good,” “open to criticism,” “fallacious,” and so forth. Hence our primary concern will be with the problems of how to criticize an argument, and when a criticism is reasonably justified.