Traditional and Analytical Philosophy
Lectures on the Philosophy of Language
Cambridge Philosophy Classics Series

Ernst Tugendhat's major work, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie (1976), was translated into English in 1982. Although trained in Heideggerian phenomenological and hermeneutical thinking, Tugendhat increasingly came to believe that the most appropriate approach to philosophy was an analytical one. This influential work grew from that conviction and brought new perspectives to some of the central and abiding questions of metaphysics and the philosophy of language. Presented in a fresh twenty-first-century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface written by Hans-Johann Glock, illuminating its enduring importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this impressive work has been revived for a new generation of readers.

Preface to this edition Hans-Johann Glock; Translator's preface; Part I. Introduction: Confrontation of Analytical Philosophy with Traditional Conceptions of Philosophy: 1. A question of method; 2. A philosopher in search of a conception of philosophy; 3. Ontology and semantics; 4. Has formal semantics a fundamental question?; 5. Consciousness and speech; 6. The argument with the philosophy of consciousness continued; 7. A practical conception of philosophy; Part II. A First Step: Analysis of the Predicative Sentence: 8. Preliminary reflections on method and preview of the course of the investigation; 9. Husserl's theory of meaning; 10. Collapse of the traditional theory of meaning; 11. Predicates: the first step in the development of an analytical conception of the meaning of sentences. The dispute between nominalists and conceptualists; 12. The basic principle of analytical philosophy. The dispute continued. Predicates and quasi-predicates; 13. The meaning of an expression and the circumstances of its use. Dispute with a behaviouristic conception; 14. The employment-rule of an assertoric sentence. Argument with Grice and Searle; 15. Positive account of the employment-rule of assertoric sentences in terms of the truth-relation; 16. Supplements; 17. 'And' and 'or'; 18. General sentences. Resumption of the problem of predicates; 19. The mode of employment of predicates. Transition to singular terms; 20. What is it for a sign to stand for an object? The traditional account; 21. The function of singular terms; 22. Russell and Strawson; 23. What is 'identification'?; 24. Specification and identification. Specification and truth; 25. Spatio-temporal identification and the constitution of the object-relation; 26. Supplements; 27. Results; 28. The next steps; Notes; Bibliography; Indexes.

Ernst Tugendhat was a Professor of Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin until his retirement in 1992. His many publications include Vorlesungen über Ethik (1993) and Ethics and Politics (1992).