'Language Turned on Itself' is a book about how language can be used to talk about language. It examines the semantics, the pragmatics, and the syntax of linguistic devices that can be used in this way.

Linguistic Turns rewrites the intellectual and cultural history of early twentieth-century Europe. In chapters that study the work of Saussure, Russell, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Cassirer, Shklovskii, the Russian Futurists, Ogden and Richards, Sorel, Gramsci, and others, it shows how European intellectuals came to invest 'language' with extraordinary force, at a time when the social and political order of the continent was itself in question. By examining linguistic turns in concert rather than in isolation, the volume changes the way we see them—no longer simply as moves in individual disciplines, but as elements of a larger constellation, held together by common concerns and anxieties. In a series of detailed readings, the volume reveals how each linguistic turn invested 'language as such' with powers that could redeem not just individual disciplines but Europe itself. It shows how, in the hands of different writers, language becomes a model of social and political order, a tool guaranteeing analytical precision, a vehicle of dynamic change, a storehouse of mythical collective energy, a template for civil society, and an image of justice itself. By detailing the force linguistic turns attribute to language, and the way in which they contrast 'language as such' with actual language, the volume dissects the investments made in words and sentences and the visions behind them. The constellation of linguistic turns is explored as an intellectual event in its own right and as the pursuit of social theory by other means.

Language Turned on Itself examines what happens when language becomes self-reflexive; when language is used to talk about language. Those who think, talk, and write about language are habitual users of various metalinguistic devices, but reliance on these devices begins early: kids are told, 'That's called a "rabbit"'. It's not implausible that a primitive capacity for the meta-linguistic kicks in at the beginning stages of language acquisition. But no matter when or how frequently these devices are invoked, one thing is clear: they present theorists of language with a complex data pattern. Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore show that the study of these devices and patterns not only represents an interesting and neglected project in the philosophy of language, but also carries important consequences for other parts of philosophy. Part I is devoted to presenting data about various aspects of our metalinguistic practices. In Part II, the authors examine and reject the four leading metalinguistic theories, and offer a new account of our use of quotation in a variety of different contexts. But the primary goal of this book is not to promote one theory over another. Rather, it is to present a deeply puzzling set of problems and explain their significance

This volume focuses on the relation between theory and description by examining aspects of transitivity in different languages. Transitivity — or case grammar, to use the popular term — has always occupied a centre-stage position in linguistics, not least because of its supposedly privileged relation to states of affairs in the real world. Using a systemic functional perspective, the ten papers in this volume make a contribution to this scholarship by focusing on the transitivity patterns in language as the expression of the experiential metafunction. Through a study of different languages — English, Dutch, German, Finnish, Chinese and Pitjantjatjara — the contributors provide functional descriptions of the various categories of process, their participants and circumstances, including phenomena such as di-transitivity, causativity, the get-passive, etc. With the relation between theories and descriptions running through the ten chapters of this volume as sometimes an overt and sometimes a covert theme, the chapters point to the nature of the linguistic fact which is linked ineluctably on the one hand to the nature of the theory and on the other to the speakers’ experience of the world in which they live. The majority of papers included in the volume derive from the 19th International Systemic Functional Congress at Macquarie University.

The Linguistic Turn provides a rich and representative introduction to the entire historical and doctrinal range of the linguistic philosophy movement. In two retrospective essays titled "Ten Years After" and "Twenty-Five Years After," Rorty shows how his book was shaped by the time in which it was written and traces the directions philosophical study has taken since. "All too rarely an anthology is put together that reflects imagination, command, and comprehensiveness. Rorty's collection is just such a book."—Review of Metaphysics

In the Name of Friendship: Deguy, Derrida and "Salut" centres on the relationship between poet Michel Deguy and philosopher Jacques Derrida. Translations of two essays, "Of Contemporaneity" by Deguy and "How to Name" by Derrida, allow Christopher Elson and Garry Sherbert to develop the implications of this singular intellectual friendship. In these thinkers’ efforts to reinvent secular forms of the sacred, such as the singularity of the name, and especially poetic naming, Deguy, by adopting a Derridean programme of the impossible, and Derrida, by developing Deguy's ethics of naming through the word "salut," situate themselves at the forefront of contemporary debates over politics and religion alongside figures like Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Marion, John Caputo and Martin Hagglund.

The most influential treatments of Shakespeare's Sonnets have ignored the impact of theology on his poetics, examining instead the poet's "secular" emphasis on psychology and subjectivity. Reading Shakespeare's Will offers the first systematic account of the theology behind the poetry. Investigating the poetic stakes of Christianity's efforts to assimilate Jewish scripture, the book reads Shakespeare through the history of Christian allegory. To "read Shakespeare's will," Freinkel argues, is to read his bequest to and from a literary history saturated by religious doctrine. Freinkel thus challenges the common equation of subjectivity with secularity, and defines Shakespeare's poetic voice in theological rather than psychoanalytic terms. Tracing from Augustine to Luther the religious legacy that informs Shakespeare's work, Freinkel suggests that we cannot properly understand his poetry without recognizing it as a response to Luther's Reformation. Delving into the valences and repercussions of this response, Reading Shakespeare's Will charts the notion of a "theology of figure" that helped to shape the themes, tropes, and formal structures of Renaissance literature and thought.