Pieranna Garavaso and Nicla Vassallo investigate Gottlob Frege's notion of thinking (das Denken) to provide a new analysis of a largely unexplored area of the philosopher's work. Confronting Frege's deeply seated and widely emphasized anti-psychologism, Frege on Thinking and Its Epistemic Significance claims that the objective human science that Frege proposed can only be possible through a nuanced notion of thinking as neither merely psychological nor merely logical. Focusing on what Frege says about thinking in many passages from his works, Garavaso and Vassallo argue that Frege was engaged with issues that are still alive in contemporary debates, such as the definition of knowledge and the necessary role of language in conceptual thinking and in the expression of thoughts. Frege on Thinking and Its Epistemic Significance is essential not only for those interested in a new and original reading of Frege’s philosophy, but also for anyone engaged in epistemology, logic, psychology, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy.

The nature of reference, or the relation of a word to the object to which it refers, has been perhaps the dominant concern of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Extremely influential arguments by Gottlob Frege around the turn of the century convinced the large majority of philosophers that the meaning of a word must be distinguished from its referent, the former only providing some kind of direction for reaching the latter. In the last twenty years, this Fregean orthodoxy has been vigorously challenged by those who argue that certain important kinds of words, at least, refer directly without need of an intermediate meaning or sense. The essays in this volume record how a long-term study of Frege has persuaded the author that Frege's pivotal distinction between sense and reference, and his attendant philosophical views about language and thought, are unsatisfactory. Frege's perspective, he argues, imposes a distinctive way of thinking about semantics, specifically about the centrality of cognitive significance puzzles for semantics. Freed from Frege's perspective, we will no longer find it natural to think about semantics in this way.

This book offers a comprehensive critical survey of issues of historical interpretation and evaluation in Bertrand Russell's 1918 logical atomism lectures and logical atomism itself. These lectures record the culmination of Russell's thought in response to discussions with Wittgenstein on the nature of judgement and philosophy of logic and with Moore and other philosophical realists about epistemology and ontological atomism, and to Whitehead and Russell’s novel extension of revolutionary nineteenth-century work in mathematics and logic. Russell's logical atomism lectures have had a lasting impact on analytic philosophy and on Russell's contemporaries including Carnap, Ramsey, Stebbing, and Wittgenstein. Comprised of 14 original essays, this book will demonstrate how the direct and indirect influence of these lectures thus runs deep and wide.

Applying the tools and methods of analytic philosophy, analytic feminism is an approach adopted in discussions of sexism, classism and racism. The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism presents the first comprehensive reference resource to the nature, history and significance of this growing tradition and the forms of social discrimination widely covered in feminist writings. Through individual sections on metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory, a team of esteemed philosophers examine the relationship between analytic feminism and the main areas of philosophical reflection. Their engaging and original contributions explore how analytic feminists define their concepts and use logic to support their claims. Each section provides concise overviews of the main debates in feminist literature within that particular area of research, as well as introductions to each of the chapters. Together with a glossary and an annotated bibliography, this companion features an overview of the basic tools used in reading analytic philosophy. The result is an in-depth and authoritative guide to understanding analytic feminist's characteristic methods.

Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) was unquestionably one of the most important philosophers of all time. He trained as a mathematician, and his work in philosophy started as an attempt to provide an explanation of the truths of arithmetic, but in the course of this attempt he not only founded modern logic but also had to address fundamental questions in the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. Frege is generally seen (along with Russell and Wittgenstein) as one of the fathers of the analytic method, which dominated philosophy in English-speaking countries for most of the twentieth century. His work is studied today not just for its historical importance but also because many of his ideas are still seen as relevant to current debates in the philosophies of logic, language, mathematics and the mind. The Cambridge Companion to Frege provides a route into this lively area of research.

Humor has been praised by philosophers and poets as a balm to soothe the sorrows that outrageous fortune’s slings and arrows cause inevitably, if not incessantly, to each and every one of us. In mundane life, having a sense of humor is seen not only as a positive trait of character, but as a social prerequisite, without which a person’s career and mating prospects are severely diminished, if not annihilated. However, humor is much more than this, and so much else. In particular, humor can accompany cruelty, inform it, sustain it, and exemplify it. Therefore, in this book, we provide a comprehensive, reasoned exploration of the vast literature on the concepts of humor and cruelty, as these have been tackled in Western philosophy, humanities, and social sciences, especially psychology. Also, the apparent cacophony of extant interpretations of these two concepts is explained as the inevitable and even useful result of the polysemy inherent to all common-sense concepts, in line with the understanding of concepts developed by M. Polanyi in the 20th century. Thus, a thorough, nuanced grasp of their complex mutual relationship is established, and many platitudes affecting today's received views, and scholarship, are cast aside.