Paradigms for a Metaphorology /
"Paradigms for a Metaphorology may be read as a kind of beginner's guide to Blumenberg, a programmatic introduction to his vast and multifaceted oeuvre. Its brevity makes it an ideal point of entry for readers daunted by the sheer bulk of Blumenberg's later writings, or distracted by their profusion of historical detail. Paradigms expresses many of Blumenberg's key ideas with a directness, concision, and clarity he would rarely match elsewhere. What is more, because it served as a beginner's guide for its author as well, allowing him to undertake an initial survey of problems that would preoccupy him for the remainder of his life, it has the additional advantage that it can offer us a glimpse into what might be called the 'genesis of the Blumenbergian world.'"--from the Afterword by Robert Savage What role do metaphors play in philosophical language? Are they impediments to clear thinking and clear expression, rhetorical flourishes that may well help to make philosophy more accessible to a lay audience, but that ought ideally to be eradicated in the interests of terminological exactness? Or can the images used by philosophers tell us more about the hopes and cares, attitudes and indifferences that regulate an epoch than their carefully elaborated systems of thought? In Paradigms for a Metaphorology, originally published in 1960 and here made available for the first time in English translation, Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) approaches these questions by examining the relationship between metaphors and concepts. Blumenberg argues for the existence of "absolute metaphors" that cannot be translated back into conceptual language. These metaphors answer the supposedly naïve, theoretically unanswerable questions whose relevance lies quite simply in the fact that they cannot be brushed aside, since we do not pose them ourselves but find them already posed in the ground of our existence. They leap into a void that concepts are unable to fill. An afterword by the translator, Robert Savage, positions the book in the intellectual context of its time and explains its continuing importance for work in the history of ideas.
Handbook of Pragmatics /
This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access - for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language - to the different topics, traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics, broadly conceived as the cognitive, social and cultural study of language and communication, i.e. the science of language use. The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers, which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995. Also available as Online Resource: benjamins.com/online/hop/
