This anthology brings together a diversity of readings in the philosophy of language from the ancient Greeks to contemporary analytic, feminist, and multicultural perspectives. The emphasis is on issues that have a direct bearing on concerns about knowledge, reality, meaning, and understanding. A general introduction and introductions to each group of readings identify both the continuities and differences in the way "big" questions in philosophy of language have been addressed by philosophers of different historical periods, institutional affiliations, races, and genders.

Andrea Nye is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She is the author of Feminist Theory and the Philosophies of Man (1988), Words of Power: a Feminist Reading of the History of Logic (1990), Philosophia: the Thought of Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt (1994), Philosophy and Feminism: at the Border (1995).