Interest in reading group for a classic in the philosophy of language?
This might be a bit of a stretch, but I was wondering if anyone would be interested in reading a key text in the philosophy of language together. I've been trying to better acquaint myself with the classics, but there aren't many people around who would be appropriate to discuss one in depth with.
It could be either analytic or continental, but preferably something from Frege/Husserl onward, and preferably something a little difficult or technical, that would benefit from a reading group, to work through the text on its own terms and not just as a ground for opinions and arguments and so on.
Some examples might be things like:
-Quine's Word and Object
-Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
-Derrida's Speech and Phenomena
-Austin's How to Do Things With Words
-Evans' The Varieties of Reference
Just suggestions, I'm open to whatever, as long as it's a 'key' text (whatever you take that to mean: no monograph published last year about Merleau-Ponty's critique of Heidegger or something like that), and not Naming and Necessity.
It could be either analytic or continental, but preferably something from Frege/Husserl onward, and preferably something a little difficult or technical, that would benefit from a reading group, to work through the text on its own terms and not just as a ground for opinions and arguments and so on.
Some examples might be things like:
-Quine's Word and Object
-Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
-Derrida's Speech and Phenomena
-Austin's How to Do Things With Words
-Evans' The Varieties of Reference
Just suggestions, I'm open to whatever, as long as it's a 'key' text (whatever you take that to mean: no monograph published last year about Merleau-Ponty's critique of Heidegger or something like that), and not Naming and Necessity.
Comments (51)
Evans' The Varieties of Reference, already mentioned, belongs downstream in the same vein; so does David Wiggins' paper The Sense and Reference of Predicates: A Running Repair to Frege's Doctrine and a Plea for the Copula.
If it was Word and Object, I have skimmed it and so am familiar with its overarching structure, and think it would deb possible to just go through a chapter of it each week, making the group as a whole last seven weeks. I'm less familiar with the structure of S&P, so we'd have to work it out some other way.
In any case those listed above are just suggestions: if there's something else someone has always wanted to read, or already has read and is interested in commenting on in depth, that would be good too.
If you want to have the best of both words, do Austin's How To Do Things With Words, then Derrida's essay "Signature, Event, Context", which is a reading of that essay.
If people decide on Derrida and anyone has trouble finding a copy, the in-print translation of the text is titled 'Voice and Phenomenon' rather than 'Speech and Phenomena'.
Isn't La voix et le phénomène on Library Genesis?
Although, I'm not finding the English equivalent. At least not the Leonard Lawlor version on there.
Again, anyone want copies, please PM me.
Yes it is! Thanks.
Could you post a couple of them side by side? I could compare them with the French original and venture an opinion regarding which one, if any, seems to err.
The basic operation of phenomenology is to divide the world up into two 'levels' as it were. The mundane world of 'stuff' and the ideal world of sense and meaning. It's kind of the difference between 'scribbles on a page' and 'words imbued with sense'. Methodologically, the idea is to 'bracket' the former while keeping analysis solely at the level of the latter. This is the 'phenomenological/eidetic reduction' or the 'epoche'. It is less a reduction to some substance or another (as is the common use of the word 'reduction') than it is a reduction in the culinary sense of boiling away the unnecessary ingredients to leave you with the important stuff - in this case sense and meaning.
Minimally, the important thing about meaning (in this context) is that it is 'ideal'. Ideal doesn't mean 'in the head' but rather something like context-invariant and infinitely repeatable. So once you 'fix' a term with a meaning, for example, no matter how one writes it - squiggly, neatly, in Arabic, in code - it's 'meaning' is 'ideal' and all the mundanities of it's 'matter' are irrelevant. Meaning here is a kind of 'form' (in the Platonic sense), which persists across all of it's material 'accidents'. This ideality is a kind of specialness which is 'present to itself'; it is correlated with 'transcendental life', a 'living present', and 'consciousness', as distinct from the 'dead' material 'stuff'. Terminologically, Husserl will refer anything that belongs to this order as 'noema', or as what belongs to the 'noetic sphere'.
So the question to keep in mind while reading is this: what is the relation between the two 'levels' of the mundane and the transcendental?
I'm going with Lawlor's 'Voice and...' and I chose that thinking that that was the recommended version.
If so, we should decide whether we want to have dedicated summaries, or do it more freestyle. Once we have a general format in mind, we can decide on a starting date and make a new thread. Do people need more time to get a copy of the work, and if so does anyone want leads or assistance?
We could just have the Intro as the eighth part of the reading, functioning basically as a sort of conclusion.
Got my order today (went overboard, b/c I got nothing else to waste money on rn) but, hey, I somehow fucked up the order and got an extra copy of Voice & Phenomenon. Anyone want it? pm me shipping info and its yours.
Reading a bit of the Derrida beforehand, he comes off as highly elliptical and more allusive, even a bit playful (and may we not even call him rhetorical?) than analytical. I hope the lacunae in the (what I guess are supposed to be?) arguments is filled in as the work proceeds.
Part of it seems to be an insistence that as indication belongs to 'mundanity' and the empirical, it is supposed to be cordoned off by the transcendental reduction, and that if we need it (although here I'm not clear on why 'need it for the analysis of language' means 'need it' simpliciter), then the reduction cannot be pure in the way Husserl wants it to be, since an empirical 'outside' that is non-ideal will always contaminate it.
But this just can't be Derrida's line of thought, because it betrays a very basic misunderstanding of the epoché as something that 'removes' some aspect of experience in favor of focusing on some other (and I worry about this because SX's summary post above seems to labor under this same misconception, and wrongly conflates the transcendental and eidetic reductions). On the contrary part of the point of the epoché is that it deprives us of nothing, and leaves us with all the richness of the empirical world just as it was, but now as 'world-phenomenon.' We expect indication to be included in the reduction, and indeed as Husserl says (and Derrida quotes him as saying), he intends phenomenology to investigate indication as a phenomenological theme in its own right.
Even if Husserl were mistaken that expression could be cordoned off from indication in soliloquy, this would just mean that in examining expression we would need to see how it intrinsically relates to indication, which isn't made any less possible from the fact that phenomenology deals in idealities. The whole point of the eidetic reduction is to extract essential structures from particular facts, and Husserl even seems to claim that it's impossible to perceive essences except via facts.
Anyway this is kind of neat, it's like a big word puzzle. You have to stare at the sentences for a long time and figure out how the words fit together. Good mental exercise.
We may need to put up sentences and see who can 'crack' them fastest, maybe give out cash prizes. I also think I may need to reread the Investigations or Ideas, which I was kind of hoping not have have to do.