Statement and Referent: An Inquiry into the Foundations of our Conceptual Order (Volume 181) (Lecture Notes)

Plato’s Parmenides and Aristotle’s Metaphysics initiated the discussion of the “First Philosophy” in the Western canon. Here, David Shwayder continues this debate by considering statements as the fundamental bearers of truth-values. Systematically moving from action to utterance, Shwayder argues that the category of “bodies” is fundamental to the human scheme of conceptualization and that if we had no capacity to refer to bodies then we would be unable to address referents from other categories.

David Shwayder retired in the late 1980s after teaching philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Michigan, as well as other universities.