Online research in philosophy

This book is an outstanding contribution to the philosophical study of language and mind, by one of the most influential thinkers of our time. In a series of penetrating essays, Chomsky cuts through the confusion and prejudice which has infected the study of language and mind, bringing new solutions to traditional philosophical puzzles and fresh perspectives on issues of general interest, ranging from the mind-body problem to the unification of science. Using a range of imaginative and deceptively simple linguistic analyses, Chomsky defends the view that knowledge of language is internal to the human mind. He argues that a proper study of language must deal with this mental construct. According to Chomsky, therefore, human language is a 'biological object' and should be analyzed using the methodology of the sciences. His examples and analyses come together in this book to give a unique and compelling perspective on language and the mind.

This interesting and provocative work develops a new theological approach to language in the light of contemporary critical theory.

La seule œuvre majeure publiée par Spinoza de son vivant est le Traité théologico-politique. Il y a donc un intérêt tout spécial à étudier la correspondance du philosophe pour rechercher ce qui peut être dit de ce texte. On découvre ainsi successivement : la formulation de thèmes et d'enjeux autour desquels s'élabore le Traité ; des informations historiques relatives à son contexte et à sa réception ; enfin et surtout des réactions qui sont de trois types : apologétique, dialogal, interprétatif ; c'est ce dernier type de réaction, constitué à partir d'une lettre de Lambert Van Velthuysen, qui permet de donner l'accès le plus précis à la philosophie du traité en posant les principes de son interprétation.

Critique des systèmes métaphysiques classiques Condillac entend leur opposer une métaphysique comme science de l'origine et de la genèse des idées dans la sensation. La lecture biranienne de Condillac permet d'identifier l'une des difficultés les plus profondes de ce nouveau principe dans l'apparente duplicité d'une doctrine de la passivité des facultés réduites à la sensation, et de l'activisme opératoire de leur genèse. C'est « l'énigme de la sensation transformée » . On montre que cette difficulté s'éclaire par le leibnizianisme caché de l'auteur de la Dissertation sur les Monades d'une part, et que le renoncement à l'activité métaphysique de l'idée prépare, d'autre part, la voie à la méthode des structures, que Biran désignait sans le savoir comme « opérateur secret » de la genèse condillacienne. As a critic of classical metaphysical system's inneism, Condillac intends to defend the idea of metaphysic as the science of the origin and genesis of ideas in sensation. Biran's interpretation stresses one of the deepest difficulties of this new principle, i. e. an apparent duplicity in the theory of the passivity of faculties, reduced to sensation, and of the operational activism of their genesis. It is the « riddle of transformed sensation » . It is suggested 1) that this difficulty can be related to the hidden leibnizianism of the author of the Dissertation on the Monads and 2) that renouncing the metaphysical thesis of the activity of the idea prepared the way for the method of structures, which Biran, suspecting a « hidden operator » behind the condillacian genesis, unwillingly pointed out.

Bruns lucidly depicts the distinctions and convergences between these two lines of thought by examining the works of Mallarme, Flaubert, Joyce, Beckett, and ...

In 1746 the French philosophe Condillac published his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge , one of many attempts during the century to determine how we organize and validate ideas as knowledge. In investigating language, especially written language, he found not only the seriousness he sought but also a great deal of frivolity whose relation to the sober business of philosophy had to be addressed somehow. If the mind truly reflects the world, and language reflects the mind, why is there so much error and nonsense? Whence the distortions? How can they be remedied? In The Archeology of the Frivolous , Jacques Derrida recoups Condillac's enterprise, showing how it anticipated--consciously or not--many of the issues that have since stymied epistemology and linguistic philosophy. If anyone doubts that deconstruction can be a powerful analytic method, try this.

Condillac's Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, first published in French in 1746 and offered here in a new translation, represented in its time a radical departure from the dominant conception of the mind as a reservoir of innately given ideas. Descartes had held that knowledge must rest on ideas; Condillac turned this upside down by arguing that speech and words are the origin of mental life and knowledge. He argued, further, that language has its origin in human interaction and in our natural capacity to react spontaneously and instinctively to the expression of emotions and states of mind in others. The importance of this pointedly anti-Cartesian view, and its relevance to both aesthetics and epistemology, were quickly understood, and Condillac's work influenced many later philosophers including Herder, Rousseau, and Adam Smith. His conception also anticipated Wittgenstein's view of language, its usage, and its relation to mind and thought.

This book traces the linguistic turns in the history of modern philosophy and the development of the philosophy of language from Locke to Wittgenstein. It examines the contributions of canonical figures such as Leibniz, Mill, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Austin, Quine, and Davidson, as well as those of Condillac, Humboldt, Chomsky, and Derrida. Michael Losonsky argues that the philosophy of language begins with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and demonstrates how the history of the philosophy of language in the modern period is marked by a split between formal and pragmatic perspectives on language, which modern philosophy has not been able to integrate.