The Blackwell Guide To The Philosophy Of Language

The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language is a collection of twenty new essays by internationally renowned scholars. Each contribution offers an authoritative survey of a central topic in philosophy of language, often accompanied by useful suggestions for further reading; the volume also has a large and insightful bibliography at the end. Included are chapters on analyticity, anaphora, conditionals, descriptions, formal semantics, indexicals and demonstratives, kind terms, metaphor, names, propositional attitude ascriptions, speech acts, truth, and vagueness. An introduction by the editors sets the stage for extended treatments of theories of meaning and reference, and an investigation of foundational issues. Suitable for upper-level undergraduate and graduate survey courses, The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language is an invaluable resource for students and professional philosophers alike.

Michael Devitt is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Designation (1981), Coming to Our Senses: A Naturalistic Program for Semantic Localism (1995), Realism and Truth (1997), and Language and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language (with Kim Sterelny, 1999).

Richard Hanley is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Delaware. He is the author of The Metaphysics of Star Trek (1997, reprinted in paperback as Is Data Human?), as well as articles in metaphysics and philosophy of language.