Last week I was in Oslo for the Arne Naess Memorial Seminar, an event organised by the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo. It was great to hear talks on various aspects of Naess’s work, and to have the chance to talk to a number of people who knew and worked with Naess at different stages in his career. I will be back in Oslo next year for a seminar focussing on Naess’s work in semantics and its relation to logical positivism, run by the Seminar in Science Studies at the University.

Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language, which I have co-edited with Christopher Routledge, was published by Edinburgh University Press last month. You can visit the publisher’s website here.

The Norwegian philosopher and environmentalist Arne Naess died on Monday, two weeks short of his 97th birthday. The Associated Press announcement, along with most of the tributes now being paid to Naess, focus on his ecological work and appropriately so; the ‘Deep Ecology’ movement, which he founded in 1970, is his greatest intellectual legacy. But Naess is also a significant figure in the history of analytic philosophy. He was the last surviving philosopher to have attended meetings of the Vienna Circle in the 1930s, and during the 1950s and 60s he was a sparrring partner for his near contemporaries such as A. J. Ayer and J. L. Austin. Perhaps most significantly, his dissatisfaction with logical positivism led him to pioneer methods of language study that prefigured developments in branches of linguistics such as sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics by some thirty years. He was a major intellectual figure of the twentieth century.

I am very pleased recently to have signed up as Series Editor of Continuum Studies in Theoretical Linguistics.

This new series publishes work in the forefront of present-day developments in the field. The series is open to studies from all branches of theoretical linguistics and to the full range of theoretical frameworks. Titles in the series present original research that makes a new and significant contribution and are aimed primarily at scholars in the field, but are clear and accessible, making them useful also to students, to new researchers and to scholars in related disciplines.

We are now accepting proposals for the series for research monographs or edited collections. Guidelines for preparing proposals can be found at the Continuum website.

The first title in the series, Deviational Syntactic Structures by Hans Gotzsche, is due to be published in February 2010.

I’m pleased to see a review by Nicola Lennon of my book Thinking about Language: Theories of English, together with Lesley Jeffries’s book Discovering Language: The Structure of Modern English in the current issue of Language and Literature. These are the two books that launched the Palgrave series Perspectives on the English Language.

My book Paul Grice, Philosopher and Linguist, first published in 2005, is now available in paperback.

I have just received copies from Palgrave of my new book Language and Empiricism, After the Vienna Circle, published on 17th April.

Following on my last post about this, the paperback version of my book on Paul Grice has now appeared on the Palgrave website; it’s available to pre-order and will be published in June 2008.

Here’s the link to the page.

I have just heard from Palgrave Macmillan that they are going ahead with the publication of a paperback version of my book Paul Grice, Philosopher and Linguist. This is going into production later this month, and should be out in the early part of 2008.

I have just been reading Bethan Davies’s article ‘Grice’s cooperative principle: meaning and rationality’ in the current issue of the the Journal of Pragmatics. Davies argues for the need to read Grice’s work on cooperation in the context of his philosophy as a whole. In particular, she suggests that such a reading might provide a check on what she aptly calls ‘cooperation drift’, by which Grice’s very specific and technical notion tends to merge in discussions by linguists into the more general notion of ‘cooperation’ as an admirable form of human behaviour.

I argue in my book Paul Grice, Philosopher and Linguist that Grice’s few well-known articles can fully be understood only in relation to his work as a whole, and it’s good to see this particular demonstration of that claim.

Here is a link to Davies’s article, although you’ll need a ScienceDirect login to access it in full.