Thought and Ontology

This volume contains nine previously unpublished papers which were originally given at the conference «Thought and Ontology» held in the Centro di Studi sulla Filosofia Contemporanea in Genova (Genoa).The general theme is the relation between thought and the world.Must we regard thought and world as distinct categories? Might there be quite different conceptual schemes? Can either the content of thought or the way thought is justified be independent of the world? Is truth some kind of match between thought and world, or could the relevant relation be identity? Does the distinction between veridical and illusory perception lie wholly outside the subject? Is language, the main vehicle of thought, just a natural phenomenon, or does its special involvement with normativity place it in a special category? What lesson can be drawn from our use of language to refer?

The authors, some from Italy and some from London, work within the «Analytic» tradition of Frege, Wittgenstein, Quine and Davidson; each has tried to throw some new light on familiar topics.

Mark Sainsbury is Stebbing Professor of Philosophy at King's College London.He is the author of Russell (1979), Logical Forms (1991) and Paradoxes (19952), and is editor of Mind.