Beginnings of the Philosophy of Language: Plato and Aristotle 3501-PFJPA-S

other cases, the ideas of Plato and Aristotle. Among Plato's texts on language most important are the dialogues Cratylus and The Sophist, and among Aristotle's texts – his short treatise Peri Hermeneias (De Interpretatione). During the seminar we will discuss all these three texts, but we will focus on two topics: the theory of meaning found in the De Interpretatione and the theory of names and the debate about the conventionality of language in the Cratylus.

The significance of these two texts – the De Interpretatione and the Cratylus – follows not only from the philosophical ideas present in them, but also from their historical setting and their influence on subsequent development of European thought. The Cratylus is a dialogue which offers us insight into the earliest debates on language which were going on between the sophists and the early philosophers such as Parmenides and Heraclitus. The main topic of the dialogue is the discussion about the relation between language and reality and the debate between linguistic naturalism and conventionalism. Other topics, also found in the dialogue, are the early theory of names and the problem of falsity. As for De Interpretatione, it is regarded as "the most influential text in the history of semantics" (N. Kretzmann). Its main area of influence was the theory of meaning sketched out in the first chapter and expressed in the formula: words are sings of passions of the soul (pathemata tes psyches), and the passions od the soul are likenesses of the things. It had influence also with respect to other topics, such as the doctrine of the structure of the logos and of the parts of the logos (name and predicate).

Consequently, the two main areas of interest during the seminar will be:

– theory of meaning as found in the De Interpretatione, the emergence of the so called mentalistic theory of meaning, which marks the beginning of along tradition in Western thinking on language; this tradition is active until the time of Mill and Frege; during the seminar we will analyze Aristotle's text, we will discuss the interpretative problems in the text, we will present different interpretations of his semantics and we will reflect on philosophical advantages and disadvantages of the mentalistic approach to meaning; additional topics will include the problem of the structure of the logos and other topics found in De Interpretatione;

– the problem of the relation between language and reality, which in presocratic philosophy and in the dialogue Cratylus has been discussed in the guise of the debate on the so called correctness of names (orthotes onomaton) and the question whether a name is natural or conventional; during our analysis of this text we will discuss Plato's theory of names, the positions presented in the dialogue by Hermogenes and Cratylus and some of the ideas on language by earlier philosophers; we will also reflect on one additional issue found on the dialogue, which gains more attention in the Sophist, i.e. the problem of falsity and the possibility of false statement.