Language Philosophy

By explaining how the human brain works and outing its most irrational processes, this book provides the thinking tools that will help you make better decisions, ask the right questions (at the right time), know what to look for when evaluating information, and understand how your own brain subconsciously clouds your judgment. Think you're too smart to be easily misled? Harrison summarizes scientific research showing how easily even intelligent and well-educated people can be fooled.

"If we accept Wittgenstein's word for it," Paul Strathern writes, "he is the last philosopher. In his view, philosophy in the traditional sense was finished."

Nearly everyone swears - whether it's over a few too many drinks, in reaction to a stubbed toe, or in flagrante delicto. And yet we sit idly by as words are banned from television and censored in books. We insist that people excise profanity from their vocabularies, and we punish children for yelling the very same dirty words that we'll mutter in relief seconds after they fall asleep. Swearing, it seems, is an intimate part of us that we have decided to selectively deny.

Whenever we worry about what to eat, how to love, or simply how to be happy, we are worrying about how to lead a good life. No goal is more elusive. In How to Be a Stoic, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci offers Stoicism, the ancient philosophy that inspired the great emperor Marcus Aurelius, as the best way to attain it. Stoicism is a pragmatic philosophy that teaches us to act depending on what is within our control and separate things worth getting upset about from those that are not.

Described by the New York Times as "arguably the most important intellectual alive," Noam Chomsky is known throughout the world for his highly influential writings on language and politics. Featuring two of Chomsky's most popular and enduring books in one omnibus volume, On Language contains some of the noted linguist and political critic's most informal and accessible work to date, making it an ideal introduction to his thought.

Discover the Language of the Mind: The Hypnotist's Guide to Psycho-Linguistics by Patrick K. Porter, PhD was previously published as Psycho-Linguistics: The Language of the Mind. This fully revised edition includes updates on dozens of new developments in the hypnosis field, full transcripts for each of the eleven processes, which includes two never-before published techniques as developed and tested by Dr. Patrick Porter and the experts at Positive Changes Hypnosis Centers.

One of our greatest philosophers and scientists of the mind asks where the self comes from - and how our selves can exist in the minds of others. I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the "strange loop" - a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. The most central and complex symbol in your brain is the one called "I". The "I" is the nexus in our brain, one of many symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.

Irony and sarcasm are two of the most misused, misapplied, and misunderstood words in our conversational lexicon. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, psycholinguist Roger Kreuz offers an enlightening and concise overview of the life and times of these two terms, mapping their evolution from Greek philosophy and Roman rhetoric to modern literary criticism to emojis.

Your argument is valid and you know it; yet once again you find yourself leaving a debate feeling defeated and embarrassed. The matter is only made worse when you realize that your defeat came at the hands of someone's abuse of logic - and that with the right skills you could have won the argument. The ability to recognize logical fallacies when they occur is an essential life skill. Mastering Logical Fallacies is the clearest, boldest, and most systematic guide to dominating the rules and tactics of successful arguments.

Ellenberg chases mathematical threads through a vast range of time and space, from the everyday to the cosmic, encountering, among other things, baseball, Reaganomics, daring lottery schemes, Voltaire, the replicability crisis in psychology, Italian Renaissance painting, artificial languages, the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the coming obesity apocalypse, Antonin Scalia's views on crime and punishment, the psychology of slime molds, what Facebook can and can't figure out about you, and the existence of God.

Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953, two years after the death of its author. In the preface written in Cambridge in 1945 where he was professor of philosophy he states: ‘Four years ago I had occasion to re-read my first book (the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and to explain its ideas to someone. It suddenly seemed to me that I should publish those old thoughts and the new ones together: that the latter could be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against the background of my old way of thinking.’

In our ever-more-polarized society, there's at least one thing we still agree on: The world is overrun with misinformation, faulty logic, and the gullible followers who buy into it all. Of course, we're not among them - are we? Scientist David Robert Grimes is on a mission to expose the logical fallacies and cognitive biases that drive our discourse on a dizzying array of topics - from vaccination to abortion, 9/11 conspiracy theories to dictatorial doublespeak, astrology to alternative medicine, and wrongful convictions to racism.

In a world where fake news stories change election outcomes, has rationality become futile? In The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, Eugenia Cheng throws a lifeline to listeners drowning in the illogic of contemporary life.

This book is a crash course in effective reasoning, meant to catapult you into a world where you start to see things how they really are, not how you think they are. The focus of this book is on logical fallacies, which loosely defined, are simply errors in reasoning. With the reading of each page, you can make significant improvements in the way you reason and make decisions.

Is it right to eat a pig that wants to be eaten...? Thought experiments are short scenarios that pose a moral or philosophical problem in a vivid and concrete way. In this book Julian Baggini presents 100 of the most intriguing thought experiments from the history of philosophy and ideas.

In his Introduction, Abraham Kaplan places Dewey's philosophy of art within the context of his pragmatism. Kaplan demonstrates in Dewey's esthetic theory his traditional "movement from a dualism to a monism" and discusses whether Dewey's viewpoint is that of the artist, the respondent, or the critic.

Inside this brilliant three-in-one book collection, you’ll uncover a wealth of philosophical insights about truth, faith, and the universe around us. Drawing on the arguments and musings of the famed philosopher, David Hume, this book reveals his ideas on the questions that define our very existence. Brought to life in this collection for a modern audience David Hume’s work has stood the test of time to resonate with people across the ages.

The front cover of the second edition of Language, Truth and Logic carried this statement in capital letters: ‘THE CLASSIC TEXT WHICH FOUNDED LOGICAL POSITIVISM - AND MODERN BRITISH PHILOSOPHY.’ It was a bold statement, but the book, first published in 1936 when A. J. Ayer was just 25 and a lecturer on philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford, drew unstinting praise from leading figures in the field, including Bertrand Russell.

In The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter.

Upon its first English publication in 1959, Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery revolutionized thinking about the scientific method. Largely an exploration of the demarcation problem, or what distinguishes science from non-science, Popper introduced and defended his concept of falsifability -- that scientific systems are ones open to empirical disconfirmation -- against the prevailing views of his day.