hermeschris

 Yesterday evening I gave a speech entitled “Proper Names: a Problem in the Philosophy of Language” for Gerusija in the student culture center “Bunker”.
I gave a short overview in excerpts of the question “How does language hook up to the world” with the stations:

sharing a form: Aristotle and Wittgenstein
Dialectical inspired conceptions of the relationship “signifier [...]

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G. Evans paper ‘The causal theory of names’ (in: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 47, 1973) offers a very interesting constructive critique of Kripke’s causal theory of reference. The arguments are based on a high variety of examples (some based on Gedankenexperimente, others are real cases) which usually contain some switch of reference for [...]

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Today I was reading a lot of “classical” essays about proper names. I began with Strawson’s “On Referring”. After Frege and Russell’s logicism Strawson turned the focus on usage and context in everyday language. Very obviously he’s a initiator of speach act theory but also Wittgenstein is not far.
Tyler Burge’s “Reference and Proper Names” presents [...]

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