Aspects of Reason

by Paul Grice, Richard Warner (Editor)

Reasons and reasoning were central to the work of Paul Grice, one of the most influential and admired philosophers of the late twentieth century. In the John Locke Lectures that Grice delivered in Oxford at the end of the 1970s, he set out his fundamental thoughts about these topics; Aspects of Reason is the long-awaited publication of those lectures. They focus on an investigation of practical necessity, as Grice contends that practical necessities are established by derivation; they are necessary because they are derivable. This work sets this claim in the context of an account of reasons and reasoning, allowing Grice to defend his treatment of necessity against obvious objections and revealing how the construction of explicit derivations can play a central role in explaining and justifying thought and action. Grice was still working on Aspects of Reason during the last years of his life, and although unpolished, the book provides an intimate glimpse into the workings of his mind and will refresh and illuminate many areas of contemporary philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

Unknown Binding

First published August 30, 2001

About the author

Herbert Paul Grice (March 13, 1913 – August 28, 1988), usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British philosopher of language, who spent the final two decades of his career in the United States.

Grice's work on the nature of meaning has influenced the philosophical study of semantics. He is known for his theory of implicature.

One of Grice's two most influential contributions to the study of language and communication is his theory of meaning, which he began to develop in his article ‘Meaning', written in 1948 but published only in 1957 at the prodding of his colleague, P.F. Strawson. Grice further developed his theory of meaning in the fifth and sixth of his William James lectures on "Logic and Conversation", delivered at Harvard in 1967. These two lectures were initially published as ‘Utterer's Meaning and Intentions' in 1969 and ‘Utterer's Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word Meaning' in 1968, and were later collected with the other lectures as the first section of Studies in the Way of Words in 1989.