This outstanding student reference series offers a comprehensive and authoritative survey of philosophy as a whole. Written by today’s leading philosophers, each volume provides lucid and engaging coverage of the key figures, terms, topics, and problems of the field. Taken together, the volumes provide the ideal basis for course use, representing an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike.

Paul Artin Boghossian is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University and Director of its New York Institute of Philosophy. He has published many papers on the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, on such topics as color, rule‐following, eliminativism, naturalism, self‐knowledge, a priori knowledge, analytic truth, realism, and relativism. He is the author of Fear of Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2006) and co‐editor of New Essays on the A Priori (with Christopher Peacocke; Oxford University Press, 2000). A collection of his essays – Content and Justification – was published by Oxford University Press in 2008. A series of exchanges with Timothy Williamson, some previously published some new, on the analytic and the a priori, will appear from Oxford University Press in 2018.

Berit Brogaard is Director of the Brogaard Lab for Multisensory Research and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. Her areas of research include perception, consciousness, emotions, philosophical psychology, semantics, and philosophical logic. She has written three books: Transient Truths (Oxford University Press, 2012), On Romantic Love (Oxford University Press, 2015), and The Superhuman Mind (Penguin, 2015), as well as over one hundred peer‐reviewed articles.

John Collins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. He has published widely in the philosophy of language and mind, with especial reference to generative linguistics, and on the concept of truth. He is the author of Chomsky: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2008) and The Unity of Linguistic Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2011), and co‐editor of Experimental Philosophy, Rationalism, and Naturalism (with Eugen Fischer; Routledge, 2015).

Edward Craig is former Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1993. He is the author of The Mind of God and the Works of Man (Oxford University Press, 1987) and Knowledge and the State of Nature (Oxford University Press, 1990), as well as articles on various topics in the theory of knowledge and philosophy of language. He is chief editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Andy Egan is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He has held positions at the University of Michigan and the Australian National University. He attended graduate school at the University of Colorado and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He works primarily in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.

Kit Fine is University Professor and Silver Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at New York University. His areas of interest include philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and metaphysics and his more recent books include Modality and Tense (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Semantic Relationism (Blackwell, 2007). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Graeme Forbes is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of Attitude Problems (Oxford University Press, 2006) and the textbook Modern Logic (Oxford University Press, 1994). He works mainly in semantics, metaphysics, and logic, and has interests in compositionality, intensionality, modal metaphysics, and modal logic.

Anthony S. Gillies is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, and previously taught at the University of Michigan, Harvard, and the University of Texas at Austin, and was White Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. His research interests are in philosophy of language: formal semantics and pragmatics; epistemology: belief revision, defeasible reasoning; philosophical logic; and decision/game theory.

Bob Hale is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sheffield, and his main research interests are in the foundations of mathematics, and philosophy of logic and language. He is a member of the editorial board of Philosophia Mathematica, and is author of Abstract Objects (Blackwell, 1987) and Necessary Beings (Oxford University Press, 2013; revised 2nd edn, 2015); co‐editor of Reading Putnam (with Peter Clark; Blackwell, 1994); co‐editor of Modality: Metaphysics, Logic, and Epistemology (with Aviv Hoffmann; Oxford University Press, 2010); and co‐author of The Reason’s Proper Study (with Crispin Wright; Oxford University Press, 2001).

Anandi Hattiangadi has been Professor of Philosophy at Stockholm University and Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Studies since 2013, before which she was a tutorial fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She has research interests in the philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, metaphysics, and metaethics. Her publications include Oughts and Thoughts: Rule‐Following and the Normativity of Content (Oxford University Press, 2007), as well as numerous articles on the normativity of meaning, content, and belief.

Jussi Haukioja is Professor of Philosophy at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and editor of the volume Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Language (Bloomsbury, 2015). His research interests are in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and realism and anti‐realism.

Jane Heal is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College. Her interests are mainly in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Her previous publications include her book Fact and Meaning (Blackwell, 1989) and several journal articles in these areas. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1997.

Barry Loewer is Professor and Director of the Rutgers Center for Philosophy and the Sciences. His published work lies mainly in the philosophy of mind and psychology, the philosophy of quantum mechanics, and metaphysics, including the book Why There is Anything Except Physics (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Guy Longworth is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He works mainly in the philosophy of language and mind, including intersections with epistemology.

E. J. Lowe was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Durham, where he taught from 1980 until his death in 2014. He authored 11 books, including Kinds of Being (Blackwell, 1989) and The Possibility of Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 1998), and also co‐edited four volumes and wrote over two hundred articles for journals and edited collections.

Michael P. Lynch is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut. He is the author or editor of seven books including In Praise of Reason (MIT Press, 2012), Truth as One and Many (Oxford University Press, 2009), and True to Life (MIT Press, 2004). His research interests lie in pursuing problems within the intersection of epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language.

Penelope Mackie is Associate Professor and Reader in Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of How Things Might Have Been: Individuals, Kinds, and Essential Properties (Oxford University Press, 2006) and of a number of articles on topics in metaphysics, including causation, modality, material constitution, free will, and the fixity of the past.

Aidan McGlynn is a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He recently completed a series of papers and a monograph on knowledge first approaches to epistemology and the philosophies of language and mind. Since then, he has been working on evidence, first‐person thought and self‐knowledge, pornography, epistemic injustice, silencing, and objectification.

Andrew McGonigal holds a visiting professorship in philosophy at Washington and Lee University. Before taking up the position, he taught for 12 years at the University of Leeds. He is a co‐editor of the Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, and in 2014–2015 was awarded a Society Fellowship at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell.

Alexander Miller is Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Otago. He works mainly on the philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, and metaethics. His books include Contemporary Metaethics: An Introduction Revised and Expanded (2nd edn, Polity Press, 2013) and Philosophy of Language Revised and Expanded (2nd edn, Routledge, 2007). He is co‐editor of Rule‐Following and Meaning (with Crispin Wright; Acumen, 2002).

Richard Moran is Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, having previously taught at Princeton University. He works primarily in the areas of moral psychology, the philosophy of mind and language, aesthetics and the philosophy of literature, and the later Wittgenstein. He has published papers on metaphor, on imagination and emotional engagement with art, and on the nature of self‐knowledge. His book, Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self‐Knowledge, was published by Princeton University Press in 2001.

Michael Morris is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Good and the True (Oxford University Press, 1992), An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Wittgenstein and The Tractatus (Routledge, 2008), as well as papers in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of art.

Julien Murzi completed his PhD at the University of Sheffield in October 2010. He is Assistant Professor at the University of Salzburg, having previously been a post‐doctoral fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (of which he continues to be an external member) and Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent. He has published papers on inferentialism, logical consequence, the semantic paradoxes, the realism/anti‐realism debate, and the open future.

Bernhard Nickel is Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He works mainly in philosophy of language and semantics, with interests in metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind. He is the author of Between Logic and the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), which presents a theory of generics and genericity.

Christian Nimtz is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Bielefeld University in Germany. His interests lie mainly in the philosophy of language, modal epistemology, and meta‐philosophy. He has worked on natural kind terms, modal knowledge, thought experiments, and conceptual analysis.

Harold Noonan is Professor of Mind and Cognition at the University of Nottingham. He has published seven books, including Hume (One Word Publishers, 2007) and Frege (Polity Press, 2001), as well as various articles on topics in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of logic.

Christopher Peacocke is Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, and was previously Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he also held a Leverhulme Personal Research Professorship. He is the author of several books, most recently The Mirror of the World: Subjects, Consciousness, and Self‐Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2014), and of papers in the philosophy of language, mind, psychology, and logic. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

John Perry is the Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside. He is co‐director of the Center for the Explanation of Consciousness at the Center for the Study of Language and Information. He has authored several books, including the second enlarged edition of Reference and Reflexivity (CSLI Publications, 2012) and various articles on the philosophy of language. He also co‐hosts a weekly talk show called Philosophy Talk.

James Pryor is a Professor of Philosophy at New York University. His research focus is epistemology, formal semantics (especially issues at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and computer science), philosophy of mind, and related issues.

Mark Richard is Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He works in the philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics, as well as in mathematical and intensional logic, philosophy of logic, and philosophy of mind. He owns a Fender Stratocaster but sadly at the moment lacks a dog. He is the author of numerous articles and books, most recently Meaning in Context, Volume I: Context and the Attitudes (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Meaning in Context, Volume II: Truth and Truth Bearers (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Ian Rumfitt is a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He works mainly in the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and the philosophy of mathematics. His book The Boundary Stones of Thought (Oxford University Press, 2015) investigates conflicts between rival logical systems and how they might be rationally resolved.

Mark Sainsbury is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, having formerly taught at King’s College London. He is the author of Russell (Routledge, 1979), Paradoxes (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Logical Forms (Blackwell, 1991), Departing From Frege (Routledge, 2002), Reference Without Referents (Oxford University Press, 2005), and Fiction and Fictionalism (Routledge, 2009), and co‐author of Seven Puzzles of Thought and How to Solve Them: An Originalist Theory of Concepts (with Michael Tye; Oxford University Press, 2013). His Thinking About Things is due out from Oxford University Press in 2017.

Stephen Schiffer is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. He is the author of numerous articles and of three books: Meaning (Oxford University Press, 1972), Remnants of Meaning (MIT Press, 1987), and The Things We Mean (Oxford University Press, 2003). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Peter Schulte teaches philosophy at the Bielefeld University. His areas of specialization are philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of language, metaethics, and free will.

Patrick Shirreff received a BA (Hons) from the University of Toronto in 2010 and is an ABD at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the intersection of philosophy of language and epistemology. Specifically, Shirreff is interested in the semantics of epistemic language and what this semantic theorizing can show us about epistemic theorizing.

John Skorupski is Professor Emeritus of Moral Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. His current interests are in moral and political philosophy, metaethics and epistemology, and the history of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century philosophy. His most recent books are The Domain of Reasons (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Why Read Mill Today? (Routledge, 2006).

Robert Stalnaker is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His teaching and research interests are in philosophical logic, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is the author of Inquiry (MIT Press, 1984), and of various articles on intentionality and the foundations of semantics and pragmatics. He also has two volumes of collected papers: Context and Content (Oxford University Press, 1999) and Ways a World Might Be (Oxford University Press, 2003).

Jason Stanley is Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. His interests include the philosophy of language, the history and philosophy of logic, the history of analytic philosophy, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. He is the author of four books, most recently How Propaganda Works (Princeton University Press, 2015) and Know How (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Florian Steinberger joined the Department of Philosophy at the Birkbeck University of London in 2015, prior to which he was Assistant Professor in Philosophy and Language at the Ludwig‐Maximilians University in Munich and the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. His main research interests include parts of epistemology, normativity, and the philosophies of logic and language.

Charles Travis is Professor Emeritus at King’s College London and a Professor Afiliado in the Faculdade de Letras at the University of Porto. He has published extensively on the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. He is the author of many books, including Perception: Essays After Frege (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Objectivity and the Parochial (Oxford University Press, 2011), together with numerous articles.

Ralph C. S. Walker is Emeritus Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. His research interests are in Immanuel Kant, ethics, philosophy of religion, truth, and justification of beliefs. His publications include Kant (Oxford University Press, 1978) and The Coherence Theory of Truth (Routledge, 1988).

Brian Weatherson is the Marshall M. Weinberg Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He works on epistemology, especially on issues at the intersection of ethics and epistemology, and issues at the interface between formal and traditional approaches to epistemology, as well as on many topics in philosophy of language.

Daniel Wee teaches philosophy at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam, having completed his PhD on rule‐following and communitarianism at the University of Otago in 2016. His research interests are in philosophy of language, ethics, meta‐philosophy, and critical thinking.

Bernhard Weiss is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town. He is the editor of the collection Dummett on Analytical Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and author of two books: Michael Dummett (Acumen, 2002) and How To Understand Language (Acumen, 2010). His areas of interest concern philosophies of language, logic and mathematics, and realism and anti‐realism.

David Wiggins is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Oxford. He was previously Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, and before that Fellow and Praelector of University College, Oxford. His principal publications are Sameness and Substance (Blackwell, 1980) and Needs, Values, Truth (2nd edn, Blackwell, 1998), as well as Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Sameness and Substance Renewed (Cambridge University Press, 2001). He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Timothy Williamson has been Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford since 2000, and previously taught logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh. His main research interests are in philosophical logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. He is the author of Identity and Discrimination (Blackwell, 1990), Vagueness (Blackwell, 1994), Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford University Press, 2000), and most recently Tetralogue (Oxford University Press, 2015), as well as articles in journals of philosophy and logic.

Crispin Wright is Professor of Philosophy at New York University and Professor of Philosophical Research at the University of Stirling. His books include Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics (Harvard University Press, 1980), Frege’s Conception of Numbers as Objects (Humanities Press, 1983), Truth and Objectivity (Harvard University Press,1992), Realism, Meaning and Truth (2nd edn, Blackwell, 1993), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Language (with Bob Hale; Blackwell, 1997), The Reason’s Proper Study (with Bob Hale; Clarendon Press, 2001), Rails to Infinity (Harvard University Press, 2001), and Saving the Differences (Harvard University Press, 2003). Two collections of his papers, The Riddle of Vagueness and Imploding the Demon, are currently in preparation.

We have taken advantage of Wiley‐Blackwell’s generous offer to publish a second and significantly expanded version of the first (1997) edition of the Companion to update the original chapters and to publish a range of new chapters that both broaden and deepen the coverage provided in the earlier edition.

Of the 25 chapters in the first edition, 21 have been updated, either by the original author or by a new author specifically commissioned for that purpose. Many updates take the form of postscripts to the originals, although a few simply revise and update the text from the first edition. The first edition chapter on intention and convention has been replaced by an entirely new chapter on the topic by Stephen Schiffer. The only first edition chapters reprinted unchanged are those by Christopher Peacocke, Robert Stalnaker, and Jason Stanley.

In addition to the 21 updates to the first edition and Schiffer’s new chapter on intention and convention, there are 16 wholly new chapters covering both foundational issues and issues relating to specific linguistic phenomena. We have retained the tripartite structure of the original and have added a few new entries to the glossary.

We’re grateful to all of our authors, both old and new, for their excellent chapters, updates, and glossary entries, and to Mark Cooper and Allison Koska at Wiley‐Blackwell for their support and patience. Thanks, too, to Marielle Suba for her work on formatting final versions of the chapters, and to Marguerite Nesling and Giles Flitney for assistance with copy‐editing and proofreading.