ABSTRACT

What is philosophy about and what are its methods? Philosophy and Ordinary Language is a defence of the view that philosophy is largely about questions of language, which to a large extent means ordinary language. Some people argue that if philosophy is about ordinary language, then it is necessarily less deep and difficult than it is usually taken to be but Oswald Hanfling shows us that this isn't true.
Hanfling, a leading expert in the development of analytic philosophy, covers a wide range of topics, including scepticism and the definition of knowledge, free will, empiricism, folk psychology, ordinary versus artificial logic, and philosophy versus science. Drawing on philosophers such as Austin, Wittgenstein, and Quine, this book explores the nature of ordinary language in philosophy.

chapter |12 pages

Introduction

part |2 pages

Part I The philosophy of ‘what we say’ Its practice and justification

chapter 1|11 pages

Socrates and the quest for definitions

chapter 2|12 pages

Austin

‘At least one philosophical method’

chapter 3|15 pages

Wittgenstein

Bringing words ‘back to their everyday use’

chapter 4|21 pages

‘What we say’

Who says?

chapter 6|17 pages

Knowledge and the uses of ‘knowledge’

chapter 7|16 pages

The paradox of scepticism

part |2 pages

Part II The philosophy of ‘what we say’ Challenge and rejection

chapter 8|21 pages

Drawing the curtain of words

chapter 9|26 pages

Language remade

Ancient cities and orderly towns

chapter 10|27 pages

Grice: ‘true even if misleading’

‘True, even if misleading’

chapter 11|19 pages

Quine and the unity of science

chapter 12|22 pages

Scientific realism

Discovering what we really mean