Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of language asks what meaning is, how words latch on to the world, and how speakers get across more than they say. The beginner tier builds the basic vocabulary of reference, truth conditions, sense, implicature, speech acts, and context. The intermediate tier covers the classic twentieth-century debates: Russell and Strawson, Kripke on names and necessity, possible-worlds semantics, Grice, Wittgenstein on rules, and Quine and Davidson on interpretation. The advanced tier is research-level and runs in five strands: reference and context after Kaplan, formal semantics from Montague to inquisitive semantics, context-sensitivity and relativism, pragmatics and the politics of speech, and metasemantics, the question of what makes an expression mean what it does.
Beginner
No prior exposure assumed. Every term is defined where it first appears.
Intermediate
Undergraduate level. Formal machinery, standard results, and the objections that stuck.
Advanced
Graduate level. Metatheory, technical variants, and disputes that are still open.