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Language, Mind, and Knowledge was first published in 1975. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This is Volume VII of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, a series published in cooperation with the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota and edited by Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell. Professor Maxwell is the present director of the Center. Some of the papers in this volume were presented at or grew out of a conference on the philosophy of language which was held at the Center under the direction of Professor Gunderson. Others were written independently.

The aim of the book, like that of the conference, is to assemble a wide variety of approaches to issues in the philosophy of language with emphasis on the ways in which the issues involved have bearing on other matters such as linguistic theory, cognitive psychology, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology.

There are twelve papers by eleven contributors: "Languages and Language" by David Lewis; "Logic and Language: An Examination of Recent Criticisms of Internationalism" by Jerrold J. Katz; "The Meaning of 'Meaning'" by Hilary Putnam; "Reference and Context" by Charles Chastain; "Language, Thought, and Communication" by Gilbert Harman; "Knowledge of Language" by Noam Chomsky; "Language, Rules, and Complex Behavior" by Michael D. Root; "A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts" by John R. Searle; "On What We Know" by Zeno Vendler; "Vendler on Knowledge and Belief" by Bruce Aune; "Reply to Professor Aune" by Zeno Vendler; "Brain Writing and Mind Reading" by D.C. Dennett.

The word “biology” was first used to describe the scientific study of life in 1802, and as Davide Tarizzo demonstrates in his reconstruction of the genealogy of the concept of life, our understanding of what being alive means is an equally recent invention. Focusing on the histories of philosophy, science, and biopolitics, he contends that biological life is a metaphysical concept, not a scientific one, and that this notion has gradually permeated both European and Anglophone traditions of thought over the past two centuries.

Building on the work undertaken by Foucault in the 1960s and ‘70s, Tarizzo analyzes the slow transformation of eighteenth-century naturalism into a nineteenth-century science of life, exploring the philosophical landscape that engendered biology and precipitated the work of such foundational figures as Georges Cuvier and Charles Darwin. 

Tarizzo tracks three interrelated themes: first, that the metaphysics of biological life is an extension of the Kantian concept of human will in the field of philosophy; second, that biology and philosophy share the same metaphysical assumptions about life originally advanced by F. W. J. Schelling and adopted by Darwin and his intellectual heirs; and third, that modern biopolitics is dependent on this particularly totalizing view of biological life. 

Circumventing tired debates about the validity of science and the truth of Darwinian evolution, this book instead envisions and promotes a profound paradigm shift in philosophical and scientific concepts of biological life.

Lively Capital is an urgent and important collection of essays addressing the reconfigured relations between the life sciences and the market. Exploring the ground where social and cultural anthropology intersect with science and technology studies, prominent scholars investigate the relationship of biotechnology to ethics, governance, and markets, as well as the new legal, social, cultural, and institutional mechanisms emerging to regulate biotechnology. The contributors examine genomics, pharmaceutical marketing, intellectual property, environmental science, clinical trials, patient advocacy, and other such matters as they are playing out in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Lively Capital is not only about the commercialization of the life sciences, but their institutional histories, epistemic formations, and systems of valuation. It is also about the lively affects—the emotions and desires—involved when technologies and research impinge on experiences of embodiment, kinship, identity, disability, citizenship, accumulation, and dispossession. At stake in the commodification of the life sciences are opportunities to intervene in and adjudicate matters of health, life, and death.

Contributors. Timothy Choy, Joseph Dumit, Michael M. J. Fischer, Kim Fortun, Mike Fortun, Donna Haraway, Sheila Jasanoff, Wen-Hua Kuo, Andrew Lakoff, Kristin Peterson, Chloe Silverman, Elta Smith, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Travis J. Tanner