This paper presents an introductory overview of Plato’s poetics, aesthetics, and literary theory, with particular reference to his notion of mimesis, and grounding the discussion on his Theory of Ideas. It is part of a lecture series on the history of literary criticism, partly available online as HYPERCRITICA: A HYPERTEXTUAL HISTORY OF LITERARY…[Read more]

Although now largely forgotten, the international language movement was, from the 1880s to the end of the Second World War, a matter of widespread public interest, as well as a concern of numerous scientists and scholars. The primary goal was to establish a language for international communication, but in the early twentieth century an increasing…[Read more]

A frequently mentioned if somewhat peripheral figure in the historiography of late nineteenth-century linguistics is the German sinologist and general linguist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893). Today Gabelentz is chiefly remembered for several insights that proved to be productive in the development of subsequent schools and subdisciplines. I…[Read more]

Review of Evaluating Cartesian Linguistics, by Christina Behme

The multifaceted concept of ‘form’ plays a central tole in the linguistic work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), where it is deeply entwined with aesthetic questions. H. Steinthal’s (1823–1899) interpretation of linguistic form, however, made it the servant of psychology. The Formungstrieb (drive to formation) of Georg von der Gabelentz…[Read more]

Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960) was both an innovative astronomer and an influential Marxist. In this article we will investigate both his Milky Way research and Marxist philosophy, with special focus on his ideal scholarly persona and the epistemic virtues he advocated in his research. This focus allows us to place Pannekoek in the larger development…[Read more]

Anton Pannekoek (1873–60) was both an influential Marxist and an innovative astronomer. This paper will analyze the various innovative methods that he developed to represent the visual aspect of the Milky Way and the statistical distribution of stars in the galaxy through a framework of epistemic virtues. Doing so will not only emphasize the u…[Read more]

This article considers the question ‘What makes hope rational?’ We take Adrienne
Martin’s recent incorporation analysis of hope as representative of a tradition that views the
rationality of hope as a matter of instrumental reasons. Against this tradition, we argue that
an important subset of hope, ‘fundamental hope’, is not governed by instru…[Read more]

This rubric is designed to facilitate a creative and lively philosophical dialogue online by encouraging strong writing in blog posts and comments. These criteria will be used for the qualitative evaluation of the blog posts and comments.

‘In The Inhumanist Manifesto, Gary Hall writes that “[i]f the inhuman equals the human intertwined with the nonhuman, then the inhumanities are the humanities.” Articulating the latest version of his radical theories on posthumanism, piracy, Marxism, open access and the commons, this bold remix of Hall’s self-proclaimed pirate philosophy detai…[Read more]

This paper is concerned with the syntax and semantics of the Turkish pronominal element kendisi ‘self.3SG’ that has so far received very little attention in the literature on anaphoric relations. We start out by examining the properties of this pronoun proceeding next to discuss the few existing proposals highlighting their inadequacies when con…[Read more]

The present contribution follows up on Rudnev (2011). It is for this reason that I omit most of the arguments for the pronominal nature of kendisi and
present a formalisation of its semantic properties based on Partee (1983) and Elbourne (2008).

This paper documents a number of restrictions on negation marking in Avar, a Northeast Caucasian language, and presents a tentative analysis of the observed morphosyntactic facts as having a semantic basis. The two different negation markers are analysed, based on the proposal in (Ramchand & Svenonius 2014), as taking complements of a different…[Read more]

This paper claims that the scope properties of the Russian disjunction marker ili correlate with the phrasal vs. clausal nature of the disjunction: phrasal disjunction yields narrow scope whilst clausal disjunction yields wide scope. In so doing, we introduce novel empirical generalisations that are problematic for purely semantic analyses of…[Read more]

This paper discusses two morphologically related anaphoric pronouns in Avar (Avar-Andic, Nakh-Daghestanian) and proposes that one of them should be treated as a minimal pronoun that receives its interpretation from a λ-operator situated on a phasal head whereas the other is a logophoric pronoun denoting the author of the reported event.

An Honours course taught by me at Edinburgh in 2011

An Honours course taught by me at Edinburgh in 2009 and 2012

This infographic illustrates the PPJ Formative Peer Review process from start to finish.

This work consists of two poems written in San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec, a Valley Zapotec language spoken in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. The poems are presented with English and Spanish translations, notes about the poet and translator, explanation of the translation process, and culture information.

Very short essay on the way Deleuze uses images in his book on Bacon. In the original French edition, the images are in a separate volume; he does that in order to mime, or enact, the theory of sensation in his text. It seems to me this is an unusual and promising strategy for art history (disposing images so their sequence and arrangement…[Read more]