Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism

C.K. Ogden and His Contemporaries

James McElvenny (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

200 Seiten

2019
Edinburgh University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4744-2506-3 (ISBN)

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This book explores the influential currents in the philosophy of language and linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century, from the perspective of the English scholar C. K. Ogden (1889–1957). It reveals links between early analytic philosophy, semiotics and linguistics in a crucial period of their respective histories.

This book explores the influential currents in the philosophy of language and linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century, from the perspective of the English scholar C. K. Ogden (1889–1957). Ogden was connected to several of the most significant figures of the modernist period, including Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Victoria Lady Welby, Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap. In investigating these connections, this book reveals links between early analytic philosophy, semiotics and linguistics in a crucial period of their respective histories and in turn sheds light on the intellectual history of the early twentieth century. Readers are introduced to the important interaction between Ogden’s thought and Victoria Lady Welby’s ‘significs’, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘logical atomism’ in its various forms, and the philosophy and political activism of Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap of the Vienna Circle. McElvenny also examines the background to the ideas espoused in Ogden’s book The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored with I. A. Richards, along with the application of these ideas in Ogden’s international language project Basic English.

James McElvenny is a Researcher in the Collaborative Research Centre “Media of Co-operation” at the University of Siegen, and has previously held positions at the universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge and Potsdam. He is the author of Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism (EUP, 2018), and editor of The Limits of Structuralism (2023) and Form and Formalism in Linguistics (2019).

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

2. The Meaning of Meaning

I. The many functions of language

II. Definition and the canons of symbolism

III. Logical atomism and its allies

IV. The trigonometry of reference

V. Significs and sympathisers

VI. Antagonism and synthesis

VII. Philologists, psychologists and anthropologists

3. Basic English

I. The Enlightenment and modernity

II. Peace and progress

III. The common solution

IV. Basic English and the common solution

V. Panoptic conjugation

VI. Grammatical reform

VII. Bentham and beyond

VIII. Totalitarianism and Newspeak

4. Ogden and the Vienna Circle

I. The Viennese scene

II. The everyday versus metaphysics

III. International picture language

IV. Contact and collaboration

V. Totalitarianism revisited

5. Epilogue

I. Linguistics

II. Natural Semantic Metalanguage

Bibliography

Erscheinungsdatum	15.01.2019
Zusatzinfo	4 black and white illustrations, 1 colour illustration, 4 black and white halftones
Verlagsort	Edinburgh
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	313 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Sprachphilosophie
ISBN-10	1-4744-2506-2 / 1474425062
ISBN-13	978-1-4744-2506-3 / 9781474425063
Zustand	Neuware