Tag Archives: on denoting

An Interpretation of the Gray’s Elegy Argument

Volume 11.6 of The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy (JHAP) has now been published online, with full open-access:

https://jhaponline.org/jhap/issue/view/503

It features an article by Ryo Ito, entitled “An Interpretation of the Gray’s Elegy Argument“. Here is the abstract:

In this essay, I first argue that the Gray’s Elegy Argument—the dense passage in Bertrand Russell’s ‘On Denoting’—can be interpreted as a single, coherent argument against the notion that a definite description corresponds to what I call a multifaceted object—an object having multiple facets or sides. I then look into some manuscripts Russell wrote in 1904 and in 1905. I show that he had envisaged the notion of a multifaceted object and used it for two different purposes before he discovered various objections to it, which he turned into the Gray’s Elegy Argument.

JHAP is a free, open-access, peer-reviewed journal. It is available at https://jhaponline.org/. Submissions welcome!