Roughly speaking, the philosophy of language in the analytical tradition is centered on the relations between language, language users (human agents), and the reality (or the world), typically, the relation between the natural of meaning and human agents’ understanding of the language in use, and the relation between structural analysis of the language in use and our understanding of the world. In particular, taking a certain logical construction in the Frege-Tarski’s tradition as the required framework to explore a variety of philosophical problems, which are traditionally treated as issues/problems in the scope of metaphysics, or epistemology, or philosophy of mind, or the foundation of mathematics, respectively.
We shall mainly focus on the key concepts, including reference, truth, meaning, intentionality, existence and identity. A variety of doctrines and debates concerning these key concepts will be introduced.
The course also offers in due course a brief introduction to renowned analytic philosophers in the 20th century, including Gottlob Frege, Betrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle (typically A. J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap), Oxford School of Philosophy (especially J. L. Austin and Paul Grice), W. V. Quine, Keith S. Donnellan, Donald Davidson, P. F. Strawson, Michael Dummett, and Saul Kripke.