Compositionality in Language Compositionality is a concept in the philosophy of language. A symbolic system is compositional if the meaning of every complex expression E in that system depends on, and depends only on, (J’ai) E’s syntactic structure and (Ii) the meanings of E’s simple parts. If a language is compositional, then the meaning of a sentence S in that language cannot depend directly on

Hugo Grotius (1583—1645) Hugo Grotius was a Dutch humanist and jurist whose philosophy of natural law had a major impact on the development of seventeenth century political thought and on the moral theories of the Enlightenment. Valorized by contemporary international theorists as the father of international law, his work on sovereignty, international rights of commerce and the norms of just war continue to inform theories

Self-Consciousness Philosophical work on self-consciousness has mostly focused on the identification and articulation of specific epistemic and semantic peculiarities of self-consciousness, peculiarities which distinguish it from consciousness of things other than oneself. After drawing certain fundamental distinctions, and considering the conditions for the very possibility of self-consciousness, this article discusses the nature of those epistemic and semantic peculiarities. The relevant epistemic peculiarities are mainly those

Emmanuel Kant: Aesthetics Immanuel Kant is an 18th century German philosopher whose work initated dramatic changes in the fields of epistemology, métaphysique, éthique, esthétique, et téléologie. Comme beaucoup de penseurs des Lumières, il tient notre faculté mentale de raison en haute estime; il croit que c'est notre raison qui investit le monde que nous vivons avec une structure. Dans ses travaux sur l'esthétique et la téléologie, he argues that

Gottfried Leibniz: Metaphysics The German rationalist philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), is one of the great renaissance men of Western thought. He has made significant contributions in several fields spanning the intellectual landscape, including mathematics, physics, logique, éthique, and theology. Unlike many of his contemporaries of the modern period, Leibniz does not have a canonical work that stands as his single, comprehensive piece of philosophy. Plutôt,