Adler: Some Questions about Language

Recommended reading:
Some Questions about Language: A Theory of Human Discourse and Its Objects by Mortimer Jerome Adler

“Some Questions about Language culminates in the author’s lifetime concern with basic problems in the philosophy of language. Initiated fifty years ago at Columbia University, carried forward at the University of Chicago and at St. John’s College in Annapolis, and maturing with investigations and discussions undertaken at the Institute for Philosophical Research, the theory expounded in this book provides solutions to certain problems concerning human language. It does not claim to solve all the problems that have been raised by Philosophers, but it does claim to answer the two or three most fundamental of the philosophical questions.” (Open Court Publishing Co., 1976)

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Adler: Philosophy of language

Recommended reading:

For anyone interested in the philosophy of language from an Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective, Some Questions about Language: A Theory of Human Discourse and Its Objects by Mortimer J. Adler is a must-read. Adler's work is a treasure chest of insight and analysis reflecting 20 years of research.

Description: "How do meaningless marks and sounds become the meaningful words of a natural language? What is the meaning of words that do not have referential significance? Can ordinary language really do what it appears to do, or is this an illusion? In this work, Dr. Adler argues that these fundamental questions are not satisfactorily handled in the two main philosophies of language that have dominated 20th-century thinking on the subject - the syntactical and "ordinary language" approaches. Drawing on the tradition of Aristotle, Aquinas, Poinsot and Husserl, Adler's own discussion exemplifies the third approach, which he describes as "semantic and lexical". He advances his theory of meaning and applies it to outstanding philosophical problems."

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