Slurs are rhetorically insidious and theoretically interesting because they communicate something above and beyond the truth-conditional predication of group membership, something which typically though not always projects across 'blocking' constructions like negation, conditionals, and indirect quotation, and which is exceptionally resistant to direct challenge. I argue that neither pure expressivism nor straightforward truth-conditionalism can account for the sort of commitment that speakers undertake by using slurs. Instead, I claim, users of slurs endorse a denigrating perspective on the targeted group.

Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker's meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, 'expressivists' have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe 'meaning' more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes (...) as well as propositional content. I distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges for a standard implicature analysis. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally inclined toward one of two opposite extremes when it comes to metaphor. On the one hand, partisans of metaphor have tended to believe that metaphors do something different in kind from literal utterances; it is a ‘heresy’, they think, either to deny that what metaphors do is genuinely cognitive, or to assume that it can be translated into literal terms. On the other hand, analytic philosophers have typically denied just this: they tend to assume that if metaphors (...) express any genuine content at all, then that content can in principle be paraphrased into literal terms. They often conclude on this basis that metaphor is theoretically dispensable, and so that it poses no special challenges and affords no distinctive insights for the philosophy of language and mind. (shrink)

I argue that stories are ‘equipment for living’ in two senses: retrospectively, they provide ‘configurational comprehension’ of a temporal sequence of events; prospectively, they offer templates for action. Narrative conceptions of the self appear well poised to leverage these functional roles for stories into an intuitively compelling view of self-construction as self-construal. However, the narrative conception defines selves in terms of the lives they live: a self is the protagonist in a lifelong story. And narrative structure is itself defined by (...) ‘retrospective necessity’: the meaning of events within a story is given by their contribution to that story's ending. Together, this entails that life stories hold selves metaphysically, epistemically, and practically hostage to their ends. Fortunately, narratives are just one species of interpretive frame. I suggest some alternative types of frames, including identity labels and metaphors, that support configurational comprehension, action guidance, and self construction without shackling selves to their lives’ ends. (shrink)

I distinguish among a range of distinct representational devices, which I call "frames", all of which have the function of providing a perspective on a subject: an overarching intuitive principle or for noticing, explaining, and responding to it. Starting with Max Black's metaphor of metaphor as etched lines on smoked glass, I explain what makes frames in general powerful cognitive tools. I distinguish metaphor from some of its close cousins, especially telling details, just-so stories, and analogies, in ordinary cognition and (...) communication. And I use these distinctions to illustrate different sorts of gaps that frames or models can open up between representation and reality. (shrink)

Mobsters and others engaged in risky forms of social coordination and coercion often communicate by saying something that is overtly innocuous but transmits another message ‘off record’. In both ordinary conversation and political discourse, insinuation and other forms of indirection, like joking, offer significant protection from liability. However, they do not confer blanket immunity: speakers can be held to account for an ‘off record’ message, if the only reasonable interpreta- tions of their utterance involve a commitment to it. Legal liability (...) for speech in the service of criminal behavior displays a similar profile of significant protection from indirection along with potential liability for reasonable interpretations. Specifically, in both ordinary and legal contexts, liability depends on how a reasonable speaker would expect a reasonable hearer to interpret their utterance in the context of utter- ance, rather than on the actual speaker’s claimed communicative intentions. (shrink)

Philosophers have often adopted a dismissive attitude toward metaphor. Hobbes (1651, ch. 8) advocated excluding metaphors from rational discourse because they “openly profess deceit,” while Locke (1690, Bk. 3, ch. 10) claimed that figurative uses of language serve only “to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats.” Later, logical positivists like Ayer and Carnap assumed that because metaphors like..

Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor – most especially, producing an open-ended, holistic perspective which is evocative, imagistic and affectively-laden. I argue that, on the one hand, non-cognitivists are wrong to claim that metaphors only produce such perspectives: like ordinary literal speech, they also serve to undertake claims and other speech acts with propositional content. On the other hand, contextualists are wrong to assimilate metaphor to literal loose talk: metaphors depend on using one thing as a perspective for (...) thinking about something else. I bring out the distinctive way that metaphor works by contrasting it with two other poetic uses of language, juxtapositions and “telling details,” that do fit the accounts of metaphor offered by non-cognitivists and contextualists, respectively. (shrink)

Metaphor is a pervasive and significant feature of language. We use metaphor to talk about the world in familiar and innovative ways, and in contexts ranging from everyday conversation to literature and scientific theorizing. However, metaphor poses serious challenges for standard philosophical theories of meaning, because it straddles so many important boundaries: between language and thought, between semantics and pragmatics, between rational communication and mere causal association. ;In this dissertation, I develop a pragmatic theory of metaphorical utterances which reconciles two (...) apparently incompatible intuitions. The first is that metaphors are vehicles for undertaking speech acts with a propositional content distinct from their conventional sentence meaning. The second is that metaphors are tools for inducing the essentially non-propositional effect of 'seeing things in a new light' or under a new aspect. These intuitions seem to be incompatible because it is assumed that only one can capture the essential function of metaphor. I propose instead that non-propositional 'seeing-as' or aspectual thought serves as the means by which speakers intend to accomplish their end of communicating content. This does not imply that speakers are not interested in and even committed to the effects of aspectual thought as well, only that it is not their sole, ultimate intention. ;In order to substantiate this proposal about how metaphor works, I develop an account of the psychological structures on which aspectual thought operates and the changes it engenders; I then show how the content of the speaker's intended speech act is determined by the aspect the sentence generates. By bringing propositional content and non-propositional aspectual thought together in this way, my account can treat the full range of metaphors, from 'ordinary' to 'poetic', within a unified theory. Armed with this account, we have the explanatory resources necessary to acknowledge both that ordinary conversational metaphors are efficient and sometimes essential vehicles for communicating determinate propositional contents, and also that rich, poetic metaphors are invitations to an open-ended contemplation of the subject under discussion. These apparently very different effects turn out to be manifestations of the same basic process of comprehension. (shrink)

Der Band vereint Beiträge zu neueren Entwicklungen in der Schrifttheorie, vor allem aus linguistischer, philosophischer, medientheoretischer und sprachdidaktischer Perspektive. Dabei geht es zum einen um die Frage, mit welchen Methoden und Kategorien Schrift und Schreiben analysiert werden können und worin sich die geschriebene Sprache medial von der gesprochenen unterscheidet. Zum anderen werden Einflüsse des Mediums Alphabetschrift auf die historische Entwicklung dieser Disziplinen nachgezeichnet und verschiedene Schrifttypen im Verhältnis zueinander beschrieben. Ausgangspunkt für die Beiträge waren die schrifttheoretischen Arbeiten Christian Stetters, insbesondere (...) seine Thesen, dass die Alphabetschrift nicht als eine Art Lautschrift zu begreifen sei, und dass die spezifischen Eigenschaften dieses Schrifttyps zur Genese formaler Sprachbetrachtung in Sprachwissenschaft und Philosophie entscheidend beigetragen haben. In den Beiträgen des Bandes werden Schwierigkeiten der Orthographie-Reform ebenso reflektiert wie didaktische Kontroversen zum Schriftspracherwerb, die Pragmatik des Schreibens ebenso wie die Ästhetik unterschiedlicher Schriftarten. (shrink)

Modern philosophy continues to grapple with the idea of subjectivity--and, as the concept of subjectivity has consequently been repeatedly refined and redefined, the struggle has spread to the ways we conceive of sovereignty, collectivity, nationality, and identity as a result. Yet, in the absence of an authoritative account of these central philosophical concepts, exciting new ways of thinking have emerged which continue to develop and evolve. Epidemic Subjects--Radical Ontology brings together a renowned team of contributors, including Eric Alliez, Levi Bryant, (...) Maurizio Lazzarato, Patricia McCormack, Angela Melitopoulos, Peter Sloterdijk, and Susan Stryker, who together forge a radically inclusive definition of subjectivity. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of the "girl" as a heuristic device for examining modern society and its foundations, they tie together recent trends in philosophy and offer a concrete way forward from the conception of the "thing" or "object" privileged by new materialism, speculative realism, and other theories of subjectivity. (shrink)

I compare two of Davidson's main discussions of metaphor. I argue, first, that despite some puzzling inconsistencies, the overall thrust of “What Metaphors Mean” is a radical form of noncogitivism, on which speakers of metaphors merely cause their hearers to perceive certain features in the world, but do not claim or implicate that things are any particular way. By contrast, in “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” Davidson endorses a neo‐Gricean account of metaphor as a form of speaker's meaning. However, he (...) also now advocates a radical anticonventionalism about linguistic meaning in general, which threatens to undermine his new view of metaphor. Finally, I articulate and evaluate a neo‐Davidsonian view of metaphor, which retains as much as possible from both papers. (shrink)

This edited collection brings together thirteen inaugural lectures given at the 'old' philosophical faculty of the University of Vienna. It presents the voices of important representatives of humanities, cultural and natural sciences through programmatic texts from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. Some published for the first time, the lectures have been annotated by renowned scholars in terms of disciplinary, scientific and academic history as well as socio-political context. Hence, this volume contributes substantially to the so far under-researched history (...) of the inaugural lecture as a university ritual, academic practice and text-genre. With inaugural lectures by Alexander Conze, Erich Schmidt, Ernst Mach, Elise Richter, Ludwig Boltzmann, Moritz Schlick, Erwin Schrödinger and others. (shrink)

Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932) was a student of Franz Brentano and Alexius Meinong. The topic of this paper is Ehrenfels’ relation to Brentano, in particular Brentano’s influence on his philosophical work. After a sketch of Ehrenfels’ most important contributions to philosophy (which belong to the fields of philosophical psychology and value theory), I present those passages within Ehrenfels’ work in which he explicitly deals with Brentano. These concern, in particular, Brentano’s theory of love and hate as well as his theory (...) of intensity and his theory of preferring and adequate emotions. (shrink)

Parmi les premières interventions philosophiques au sujet du coronavirus, les voix de Giorgio Agamben et de Jean-Luc Nancy se sont confrontées dans un vif débat qui fournit à cette étude ses sources et le champ restreint de sa réflexion. Il s’agit de montrer comment le paradigme de la biopolitique auquel Agamben fait référence pour expliquer la vraie nature de l’épidémie virale s’expose aux dangers totalisants de ce que Nancy nomme un « néo-viralisme » à peine séparable du néolibéralisme. En reconstruisant (...) les arguments des deux côtés, l’analyse situe notamment le concept de la liberté au sein du différend entre les ces deux penseurs, issus de la même famille philosophique et parmi les plus importants de leur génération. Dès lors se verra sévèrement mise en cause l’idée même de la liberté, cette liberté au nom de laquelle se déclarent bien nombre de contestataires contre les mesures qui limitent la liberté individuelle. (shrink)

In 1976 an interdisciplinary study on risks and risk evaluations was inaugurated in Sweden and was sponsored by the Committee for Future-oriented Research. One of the basic assumptions of the Swedish risk project was that modern society has created “new, increasingly complicated and large-scale technical systems.” It also assumed that “large systems are economically efficient, but vulnerable and therefore create risks.” A third assumption was that “the ever rising standard of living is purchased at the cost of certain additional risks.” (...) The perspective of the project was thus markedly historically oriented. (shrink)

Gegenstand der Erörterung ist die Offenlegung des faktischen und potentiellen Ethikbezugs von Technik. Grundlegend für jede Ethik ist ein je bestimmtes Verständnis des Menschen und seiner Wirklichkeit. Diese prinzipielle Positionalität ist gegenüber diskurs- und verfahrensethischen Ansätzen ebenso festzuhalten wie gegenüber utilitaristischen Nivellierungen grundlagentheoretischer Fragen. Die vorliegende Untersuchung aus evangelischer Perspektive zeigt anhand der Analyse zweier technikphilosophischer Konzeptionen der Gegenwart (G. Ropohl, W. Ch. Zimmerli) die Relevanz von Technikethik nicht nur für Techniker, sondern bezüglich menschlichen Handelns im allgemeinen.

We do many things with words. We describe, we plan and promise, we invite and command, we hint and intimate. We also use words to wound – to demean, insult, and exclude. The fact that words can have such potent, pernicious effects is puzzling, because they are, after all, just words. As the schoolyard chant goes, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Words do hurt though–not only our feelings, but our social status, even (...) our basic dignity as human beings. How can sounds and shapes do all that? Many philosophers have thought of language as a kind of game. Both games and language are complex, abstract structures that we deploy strategically to achieve serious goals, as well as for fun. Thinking through some of these similarities can illuminate how something so intangible can have such powerful effects, and seeing how people wield that power for malicious ends can reveal how to turn the tables and fight back. (shrink)

"Aujourd'hui, notre pitié ne s'arrête plus à l'humanité. Elle continue sur sa lancée. Elle repousse les frontières. Elle élargit le cercle du semblable. Quand un coin du voile est levé sur l'invivable existence des poules, des vaches ou des cochons dans les espaces concentrationnaires qui ont succédé aux fermes d'autrefois, l'imagination se met aussitôt à la place de ces bêtes et souffre avec elles. L'homme moderne est tiraillé entre une ambition immense et une compassion sans limite. Il veut être le (...) Seigneur de la Création et il découvre progressivement en lui la faculté de s'identifier à toutes les créatures. Ainsi s'explique l'irruption récente de la cause animale sur la scène politique. La nouvelle sensibilité aux animaux aura-t-elle le pouvoir de changer la donne ou l'impératif de rentabilité continuera- t-il à faire la loi, en dépit de tous les cris du coeur?" A. F. (shrink)

We are not convinced by Gangestad & Simpson that differential mating strategies within each sex would be greater than such strategies between sexes. The target article does not provide actual evidence of human males who do not desire mating with multiple females, or evidence that the benefits for females of short-term matings with multiple males have ever outweighed the associated costs.

Bezeichnet man im deutschsprachigen Raum eine kulturelle Veranstaltung als 'Spektakel', geht damit oft eine negative Wertung einher. Im Gegensatz dazu zeigt der Band die vielfältigen Begriffsdimensionen, medialen Charakteristika und Funktionen dieser zentralen ästhetischen Kategorie in künstlerischen, epistemischen und politischen Kontexten auf. Beiträge aus Kunstgeschichte, Philosophie, Film-, Literatur-, Medien-, Tanz- und Theaterwissenschaft setzen sich mit ästhetischen Theorien und Praktiken des Spektakels von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart auseinander. Die behandelten Beispiele reichen von der christlichen Liturgie bis zur Barockoper, von Paulinus von (...) Nola bis Christoph Schlingensief, vom populären Wissenschaftstheater des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zu politischen Funktionen des Spektakulären im südkoreanischen Kino oder dem italienischen Roman, in Alltag und Kunst des Sozialismus sowie der globalen Medienkultur. Mit Beiträgen von: Micha Braun, Simon Frisch, Elisabeth Fritz, Antje Géra, Nicola Gess, Martin Hähnel, Sarah Hegenbart, Teresa Hiergeist, Carsten Juwig, Katherina Keller-Grein, Kirsten Maar, Astrid Matron, Kassandra Nakas, Ulf Otto, Rita Rieger, Ivo Ritzer, Tanja Schwan und Christiane Voss"--Back cover. (shrink)

Here, I offer a rapid overview of the theory of metaphor, in order to situate the contributions to this volume in relation to one another and within the field more generally.

The Selected Works of Arne Naess, ed. by Harold Glasser and Alan Drengson in cooperation with the author, Dordrecht: Springer 2005. 10 volumes. On January 12, 2009 Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess passed away at the age of 96. He was still actively involved in putting together the edition of the Selected Writings of Arne Naess . He worte an introduction to the writings which is printed at the beginning of each volume together with the extensive introduction by the editor Harold (...) Glasser. At first sight this seems strangely repetitive and superfluous but on closer scrutiny it certainly makes sense. In view of the large breadth of philosophical themes that are presented in the volumes it is quite likely that the readers interested in the writings will come from different areas. A number of these writings make high demands on the reader who is expected to be relatively versed in logical analysis and in the work and thought of Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Gandhi, Husserl, Carnap or even Sextus Empiricus. The reader who is interested in one of these heterogenous fields is encouraged by both introductory texts to reflect on a specific theme against the backdrop of the philosophers’s entire oeuvre – and that’s a good thing. (shrink)

Metaphor is a crucially context-dependent linguistic phenomenon. This fact was not clearly recognized until some time in the 1970’s. Until then, most theorists assumed that a sentence must have a fixed set of metaphorical meanings, if it had any at all. Often, they also assumed that metaphoricity was the product of grammatical deviance, in the form of a category mistake. To compensate for this deviance, they thought, at least one of the sentence’s constituent terms underwent a meaning-changing ‘metaphorical twist’, which (...) deleted the objectionable selection restriction or semantic marker (e.g., Levin 1977) or turned one of the term’s fixed set of connotations into its denotation (e.g., Beardsley 1962). This situation changed as theorists began to pay more serious attention to how metaphors actually function. First, it was pointed out that not all sentences used metaphorically are logically or even pragmatically absurd (Cohen 1975). Second, it became increasingly obvious that in the context of different sentences, and in the context of the same sentence as uttered by different speakers on different occasions, the same word could be used metaphorically to express many, very different meanings. Semantic theories became increasingly bloated as theorists attempted to encompass all this variety within the lexicon. Eventually, semantic theories of metaphor were largely abandoned. Instead, theorists generally maintained either that metaphors are a type of speaker meaning, on which a speaker says one thing in order to mean something else (e.g., Grice 1975, Searle 1979), or else that metaphors don’t have any distinctive ‘meaning’ at all, but simply cause certain distinctive effects in their hearers (e.g., Davidson 1984, Rorty 1987). Philosophers of language have devoted much energy in the last 30 years to investigating the various ways in which context can affect communicated.. (shrink)