Meaning and Conceptual Systems

Open this expecting a Soviet philosophy textbook and you will be lost within a page. There is no genuflection to Lenin, no roll-call of Party congresses, no ritual counterposing of bourgeois idealism to the achievements of socialism.

What there is instead is a close, technically demanding argument with the whole apparatus of twentieth-century analytic philosophy of language: Frege on sense and reference, Russell's theories of descriptions and of types, Carnap's programme for an ideal language, both Wittgensteins, Tarski on truth, Quine on the indeterminacy of translation, Chomsky, Montague's intensional logic, Kripke and Hintikka on possible worlds, Searle on intentionality, Putnam on reference.

Pavilionis reads these figures in the original, at length, and on their own terms - Quine and Russell each named more than eighty times, Hintikka seventy, Montague nearly seventy, Kripke sixty, Frege fifty. By any honest measure this is a serious monograph in the theory of meaning, of a kind almost nobody else in the Soviet philosophical world was writing.

Rolandas Pavilionis (1944-2006) was a Lithuanian, trained in philology at Vilnius and in logic at the Academy of Sciences in Ukraine, who defended a higher doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1981 and became a professor at Vilnius University the following year. He was, in effect, the man who brought the Western analytic tradition into Lithuanian philosophy, and his later public life belonged to an independent Lithuania that did not yet legally exist.

Three moments are folded into one volume: a monograph of 1983, a revision late in the decade, and an afterword written in Vilnius in the summer the Baltic independence movements crested.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.