Adv Intro to Philosophy of Language

(4 Credits)

Background course for entering graduate students. This comprehensive seminar covers the leading issues in the philosophy of language and the leading positions on those issues. Among topics discussed are the ontology of content; the relation between language and thought; explications of meaning; the relation between the semantic and the physical; problems of reference; and vagueness. The seminar is systematic and presents various issues and theories as part of an integrated whole in which those issues and theories stand in certain presupposition relations to one another. The seminar is critical and places emphasis less on who said what and more on the plausibility of the views considered.