Prague Linguistic Circle Papers

Prague Linguistic Circle Papers
Author: Eva Haji?ová
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2002
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781588111753

The fourth volume of the revived series of "Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague" brings three contributions (by J. Vachek, O. Leška and V. Skali?ka) connected with the classical period of the Prague School, as well as papers delivered at the conference "Function, Form, and Meaning: Bridges and Interfaces," held in Prague in 1998. Some of the contributions concern issues of grammar of different languages including a syntactic annotation of a large Czech text corpus, a comparison of Hebrew conditionals with English, a characterization of the typology of the Indo-European verb. A further part focuses on topic-focus articulation (information sentence structure, functional sentence perspective), with a concept of 'perspective' introduced as close to but distinct from 'topic' and with three different viewpoints on the semantics of information structure. Two broader essays on the nature of language are then presented, while the last section analyzes the structure of free verse. The volume represents a contribution to the continuing fruitful interaction between the work of the Prague School and the more and less closely related approaches of linguists in other countries.

Prague Linguistic Circle Papers

Prague Linguistic Circle Papers
Author: Eva Hajicova
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 347
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027254419

This volume is the first one of the revived series of Travaux, which was the well-known international book series of the classical Prague Linguistic Circle, published in the years 1929-39. The tradition of the Circle still attracts attention in broad circles of European and American linguistics. The first volume of the new series is divided into five sections: 1. Introductory papers characterizing the development of the Prague School in the recent decades; 2. Methodological issues of structural and functional linguistics; 3. Sentence structure; 4. Discourse patterns; 5. Theory of literature. In accordance with the tradition, the volume contains contributions concerning issues of principle, empirical linguistic studies, and also papers from the theory of literature.

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
Author: Edmund Husserl
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 1970
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780810104587

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl's last great work, is important both for its content and for the influence it has had on other philosophers. In this book, which remained unfinished at his death, Husserl attempts to forge a union between phenomenology and existentialism. Husserl provides not only a history of philosophy but a philosophy of history. As he says in Part I, "The genuine spiritual struggles of European humanity as such take the form of struggles between the philosophies, that is, between the skeptical philosophies--or nonphilosophies, which retain the word but not the task--and the actual and still vital philosophies. But the vitality of the latter consists in the fact that they are struggling for their true and genuine meaning and thus for the meaning of a genuine humanity."

Einstein in Bohemia

Einstein in Bohemia
Author: Michael D. Gordin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0691203822

"Though Einstein is undoubtedly one of the most important figures in the history of modern science, he was in many respects marginal. Despite being one of the creators of quantum theory, he remained skeptical of it, and his major research program while in Princeton--the quest for a unified field--ultimately failed. In this book, Michael Gordin explores this paradox in Einstein's life by concentrating on a brief and often overlooked interlude: his tenure as professor of physics in Prague, from April of 1911 to the summer of 1912. Though often dismissed by biographers and scholars, it was a crucial year for Einstein both personally and scientifically: his marriage deteriorated, he began thinking seriously about his Jewish identity for the first time, he attempted a new explanation for gravitation-which though it failed had a significant impact on his later work-and he met numerous individuals, including Max Brod, Hugo Bergmann, Philipp Frank, and Arnošt Kolman, who would continue to influence him. In a kind of double-biography of the figure and the city, this book links Prague and Einstein together. Like the man, the city exhibits the same paradox of being both central and marginal to the main contours of European history. It was to become the capital of the Czech Republic but it was always, compared to Vienna and Budapest, less central in the Habsburg Empire. Moreover, it was home to a lively Germanophone intellectual and artistic scene, thought the vast majority of its population spoke only Czech. By emphasizing the marginality and the centrality of both Einstein and Prague, Gordin sheds new light both on Einstein's life and career and on the intellectual and scientific life of the city in the early twentieth century"--

Classics of Semiotics

Classics of Semiotics
Author: Martin Krampen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2013-06-29
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1475797001

This book is designed to usher the reader into the realm of semiotic studies. It analyzes the most important approaches to semiotics as they have developed over the last hundred years out of philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and biology. As a science of sign processes, semiotics investigates all types of com munication and information exchange among human beings, animals, plants, internal systems of organisms, and machines. Thus it encompasses most of the subject areas of the arts and the social sciences, as well as those of biology and medicine. Semiotic inquiry into the conditions, functions, and structures of sign processes is older than anyone scientific discipline. As a result, it is able to make the underlying unity of these disciplines apparent once again without impairing their function as specializations. Semiotics is, above all, research into the theoretical foundations of sign oriented disciplines: that is, it is General Semiotics. Under the name of Zei chenlehre, it has been pursued in the German-speaking countries since the age of the Enlightenment. During the nineteenth century, the systematic inquiry into the functioning of signs was superseded by historical investigations into the origins of signs. This opposition was overcome in the first half of the twentieth century by American Semiotic as well as by various directions of European structuralism working in the tradition of Semiology. Present-day General Semiot ics builds on all these developments.

Historic Structures

Historic Structures
Author: F.W. Galan
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2014-10-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1477300848

In this first book-length study of Czech structuralism and semiotics in English, F. W. Galan explores one of the most important intellectual currents of the twentieth century, filling the gap between what has been written of the Russian formalism of the twenties and the French structuralism of the sixties and seventies. He records the evolution within the Prague Linguistic Circle of those theories which concern literature's change in time and the place of literature in society. In doing so, he reveals how the work of the Prague Linguistic Circle in the years 1928 to 1946 vindicate structuralism against its critics' charges that the structuralist approach—in linguistics, literary theory, film studies, and related fields—is inherently unhistorical. Overcoming this apparent methodological impasse was the main challenge confronted by the scholars of the Prague School–Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky, in particular.

Carnap Brought Home

Carnap Brought Home
Author: Steve Awodey
Publisher: Open Court Publishing
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2004
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780812695502

This collection of 16 papers collectively reassess the philosophical contribution of German thinker Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), author of such works as The Logical Structure of the World and The Logical Syntax of Language. Having begun their discussions of Carnap at a meeting in his hometown of Jena, Germany, and international group of academics contributed essays examining Carnap's importance and continuing relevance in the field of logical empiricism. Individual contributions examine such topics as Carnap's treatment of semantics; his conception of explication; continuities and discontinuities in the works of Carnap, Frege, and Quine; a Carnapian reply to Kurt Godel; and Carnap on categorical concepts. An introductory essay explores the evolution of Carnap's thought within the context of his historical milieu in Jena. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism

The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism
Author: Alan Richardson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 624
Release: 2007-09-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1139826433

If there is a movement or school that epitomizes analytic philosophy in the middle of the twentieth century, it is logical empiricism. Logical empiricists created a scientifically and technically informed philosophy of science, established mathematical logic as a topic in and tool for philosophy, and initiated the project of formal semantics. Accounts of analytic philosophy written in the middle of the twentieth century gave logical empiricism a central place in the project. The second wave of interpretative accounts was constructed to show how philosophy should progress, or had progressed, beyond logical empiricism. The essays survey the formative stages of logical empiricism in central Europe and its acculturation in North America, discussing its main topics, and achievements and failures, in different areas of philosophy of science, and assessing its influence on philosophy, past, present, and future.

Alfred Tarski

Alfred Tarski
Author: Andrew McFarland
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 511
Release: 2014-08-11
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 149391474X

Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) was a renowned Polish/American mathematician, a giant of the twentieth century, who helped establish the foundations of geometry, set theory, model theory, algebraic logic and universal algebra. Throughout his career, he taught mathematics and logic at universities and sometimes in secondary schools. Many of his writings before 1939 were in Polish and remained inaccessible to most mathematicians and historians until now. This self-contained book focuses on Tarski’s early contributions to geometry and mathematics education, including the famous Banach–Tarski paradoxical decomposition of a sphere as well as high-school mathematical topics and pedagogy. These themes are significant since Tarski’s later research on geometry and its foundations stemmed in part from his early employment as a high-school mathematics teacher and teacher-trainer. The book contains careful translations and much newly uncovered social background of these works written during Tarski’s years in Poland. Alfred Tarski: Early Work in Poland serves the mathematical, educational, philosophical and historical communities by publishing Tarski’s early writings in a broadly accessible form, providing background from archival work in Poland and updating Tarski’s bibliography. A list of errata can be found on the author Smith’s personal webpage.

Historical Dictionary of Husserl's Philosophy

Historical Dictionary of Husserl's Philosophy
Author: John J. Drummond
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2022-03-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1538133458

Edmund Husserl is generally regarded as the founding figure of the philosophical movement of “phenomenology,” by which he understands a descriptive science of the essential structures of experiences and of their objects precisely as these are experienced. Phenomenology has had a decisive influence on philosophy in the 20th century, especially in Europe. The movement known as “continental philosophy,” whether practiced in Europe or elsewhere, has its roots in phenomenology and in the post-Hegelian philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx. Historical Dictionary of Husserl's Philosophy, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries on his key concepts and major writings as well as entries on his most important predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Edmund Husserl.