Linguistic Turns

Lecture 19, “Pragmatism,” begins with an overview of the general commitments of pragmatism and then discusses the contributions and positions of its three ”founders”: Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.

Lecture 20, “Wittgenstein,” examines Ludwig Josef Johan Wittgenstein’s move from the emphasis on logic in his early work to his efforts to describe everyday language games and their relations to forms of life, in which meaning is understood as use.

Lecture 21, “Structuralism,” focuses on French structuralism. It begins by laying out some broad commitments and then focuses of the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.