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Philosophy of Language
Meaning, reference, and how words hook onto the world.
- Foundations of ArithmeticFrege's 1884 informal statement of the logicist program, arguing that arithmetic is reducible to logic and providing the conceptual foundation for the formal derivation later attempted in the Grundgesetze.Books
- GorgiasSophist and rhetorician who argued that nothing exists, and that if it did, nobody could know or communicate it.Figuresc. 483–375 BC
- Gottlob FregeThe German mathematician and philosopher whose 1879 Begriffsschrift invented modern predicate logic, whose attempt to derive arithmetic from logic founded the analytic philosophy of mathematics, and whose theory of sense and reference founded the analytic philosophy of language.Figures19th Century
- MythosThe Greek term for story, myth, or narrative — contrasted across the philosophical tradition with logos as a distinct mode of conveying truth.ConceptsClassical Greek
- Paul RicoeurFrench philosopher (1913–2005), professor at Strasbourg, Paris-Sorbonne, Paris-Nanterre, and the University of Chicago, whose hermeneutical phenomenology engaged Freud, structuralism, biblical exegesis, and analytic philosophy to produce comprehensive philosophical anthropologies of will, evil, language, narrative, selfhood, memory, and recognition.Figures20th Century
- PoeticsAristotle's short treatise on tragedy, epic, and the principles of literary composition — the founding work of Western literary theory.Books
- Pre-Socratic PhilosophyThe Greek thinkers of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE who replaced mythic explanation with natural philosophy and gave Western thought its starting categories — matter, principle, change, being.TraditionsPre-Socratic
- SophistryFifth-century BC Greek teachers of rhetoric and argument who taught for a fee, and who first argued that law and custom are human conventions rather than natural facts.Traditions5th–4th century BC
- StructuralismThe approach holding that meaning arises from relations within a system rather than from the elements themselves, applied first to language and then to myth, kinship and culture.Traditionsc. 1916–1968