Modern Philosophy of Language

A collection of seminal writings on the philosophy of language. In our century, philosophers have become increasingly concerned with the relationship between language, the mind, and the world. Language has come to be viewed both as a source of puzzlement and as a repository for untapped knowledge. The philosophy of language is an attempt to understand the nature of language and to explore the link between what we say and what we intend.

Modern Philosophy of Language brings together the most significant writings on language in twentieth-century philosophy–from the work of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and the logical positivists to the contemporary contributions of W. V. O. Quine, Noam Chomsky, and Michael Dummett. The articles collected here are benchmarks in the development of various strands in the modern analytic philosophy of language.

Maria Baghramian is Professor of American Philosophy in the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin and the co-director of the Post Graduate Programme in Cognitive Science at UCD, which she co-founded in 2000. She has also held visiting posts in Harvard, MIT, University of Yerevan, Institut Jean Nicod, École normale supérieure, Paris and various universities in China. Baghramian is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and was a member of the Council (2015-2019). Other research awards include a Fulbright senior scholarship in 2013. She has authored and edited nine books, most recently From Trust to Trustworthiness and Relativism: New Problems of Philosophy with Analisa Coliva.