The Unity of the Proposition

Richard Gaskin presents a work in the philosophy of language. He analyses what is distinctive about sentences and the propositions they express—what marks them off from mere lists of words and mere aggregates of word-meanings respectively. Since he identifies the world with all the true and false propositions, his account of the unity of the proposition has significant implications for our understanding of the nature of reality. He argues that the unity of the proposition is constituted by a certain infinitistic structure known in the tradition as 'Bradley's regress'. Usually, Bradley's regress has been regarded as vicious, but Gaskin argues that it is the metaphysical ground of the propositional unity, and gives us an important insight into the fundamental make-up of the world.

1 - Truth, falsity, and unity
2 - Sense, reference, and propositions
3 - Frege and Russell on Unity
4 - The hierarchy of levels and the syntactic priority thesis
5 - Logical predication, logical form, and Bradley's regress
6 - Bradley's regress and the unity of the proposition

Richard Gaskin has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool since 2001. Prior to that he was a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sussex from 1991-97, and then a Reader from 1997 until 2001. He has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Edinburgh, Mainz, and Bonn.