The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy of Language. Edited by Alessandro Graheli. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Pp. x + 478. Hardcover $175.00, ISBN 978-1-350-04916-1.
摘要
This volume is a noble effort to present the fruits of recent research in classical Indian philosophy of language. It is now well known that Indian philosophers had very important things to say in the areas of metaphysics and epistemology. That they also had interesting insights into the nature and uses of language is not as widely appreciated, and the present work seeks to rectify the situation. It is organized into four topical sections on, respectively, the units of speech, word meanings, sentence meanings, and figurative meaning. Each section contains essays discussing important theories and arguments in the area, arranged roughly chronologically. The volume begins with a general introduction, and there are also brief introductions for each section. At the end are a chronology of important figures in the tradition, a glossary of technical Sanskrit terms, an annotated bibliography of recent scholarship in the field, and a detailed index. All of these make this a useful work for those wishing to find out more about the subject.