Plagiarism is a crime against academy. It deceives readers, hurts plagiarized authors, and gets the plagiarist undeserved benefits. However, even though these arguments do show that copying other people’s intellectual contribution is wrong, they do not apply to the copying of words. Copying a few sentences that contain no original idea (e.g. in the introduction) is of marginal importance compared to stealing the ideas of others. The two must be clearly distinguished, and the ‘plagiarism’ label should not be (...) used for deeds which are very different in nature and importance. (shrink)

Presents Bernard Lonergan's five "verbum" articles that originally appeared in Theological studies. For Thomist students and scholars this "verbum" study offers a careful appraisal of the Thomist theory of knowledge as well as an introduction to the concepts found in Father Lonergan's "Insight". Since the concept of "verbum" dynamically affects the thought of Aquinas, it is necessary to grasp this concept to understand Thomist metaphysics and rational psychology. Lonergan has carefully analyzed and explicitly outlined "verbum"--An integral part of the Thomist (...) theory of knowledge. "Verbum" is examined as a tool of definition and for its impact on understanding, logical thought procession and related ideas stemming from "verbum". Discusses "the word" and its relation to abstraction. Focusses on St. Thomas' immediate concern in finding in Aristotle the point of insertion for Augustinian thought and in fusing a phenomenology of the subject with a psychology of the soul. (shrink)

At least since Locke, philosophers and psychologists have usually held that concepts arise out of sensory perceptions, thoughts are built from concepts, and language enables speakers to convey their thoughts to hearers. Christopher Gauker holds that this tradition is mistaken about both concepts and language. The mind cannot abstract the building blocks of thoughts from perceptual representations. More generally, we have no account of the origin of concepts that grants them the requisite independence from language. Gauker's alternative is to show (...) that much of cognition consists in thinking by means of mental imagery, without the help of concepts, and that language is a tool by which interlocutors coordinate their actions in pursuit of shared goals. Imagistic cognition supports the acquisition and use of this tool, and when the use of this tool is internalized, it becomes the very medium of conceptual thought. (shrink)

L’addition, dans la cinquième édition en 1683 de La Logique ou L’Art de penser, d’un chapitre consacré à la définition générale du signe et de plusieurs chapitres relevant spécifiquement d’une analyse des signes linguistiques, a été parfois interprétée comme une apparition tardive du “problème du langage” dans le traité d’Arnauld et Nicole. Parce que la plupart de ces chapitres supplémentaires sont la transposition de passages auparavant destinés dans la Perpétuité de la foi (1669-1674) à réfuter le sens calviniste de Ceci (...) est mon corps, on a été enclin à attribuer l’importance de la question du signe et du “problème du langage” dans l’édition de 1683 à une origine théologique. J’essaie au contraire de montrer que, dès la première édition de L’Art de penser en 1662, la problématisation des écarts des expressions linguistiques avec une correspondance terme à terme entre les mots et les idées a été indissociable pour Port-Royal de l’analyse des opérations de l’esprit. Selon moi, dans la Perpétuité de la foi, la critique du sens calviniste de la formule eucharistique constitue elle-même une application de cette analyse logique du langage : les passages incorporés ensuite dans L’Art de penser sont dans le prolongement des réflexions de 1662 sur les difficultés d’adéquation entre le dire et le vouloir-dire. Je montre pour finir que la définition générale du signe à Port-Royal suppose une restructuration de la définition augustinienne du De doctrina christiana, et fonde en 1683 une identification de la relation de signification linguistique à un rapport de représentation des mots aux idées, qui vient redoubler le rapport de représentation des idées aux choses établi en 1662. (shrink)

It is a near truism of philosophy of language that sentences are prior to words--that they are the only things that fundamentally have meaning. Robert's Stainton's study interrogates this idea, drawing on a wide body of evidence to argue that speakers can and do use mere words, not sentences, to communicate complex thoughts.

According to the semantics in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, a picture and what is pictured must have the same logical form. However necessary that may be, it cannot suffice to make one fact a picture of another. The grounds for the pictorial relation, it is argued, must be found in the transcendental will. Following a suggestion by Ramsey, the semantic resources of the Tractatus are used to construct a new interpretation of propositions as equivalence classes of facts. The nature of the involvement (...) of the will helps explain why ethics and logic are alike ineffable. (shrink)

This volume provides an introduction to word and paradigm models of morphology and the general perspectives on linguistic morphology that they embody. The recent revitalization of these models is placed in the larger context of the intellectual lineage that extends from classical grammars to current information-theoretic and discriminative learning paradigms. The synthesis of this tradition outlined in the volume highlights leading ideas about the organization of morphological systems that are shared by word and paradigm approaches, along with strategies that (...) have been developed to formalize these ideas, and ways in which the ideas have been validated by experimental methodologies. An extended comparison of contemporary word and paradigm variants isolates the central assumptions about morphological units and relations that distinguish implicational from realizational models and clarifies the relation of these models to morpheme-based accounts. Designed to be accessible to a wide readership, this book will serve both as an introduction to morphology and morphological theory from the word and paradigm perspective for non-specialists, and for morphologists, as a detailed account of the history of the ideas that underlie these models. (shrink)

One of the characteristics of what has been called “dogwhistle politics” is the presence of a rhetoric that targets minority groups implicitly. For example, terms like ‘illegals’ and ‘illegal immigrants’, used to target Latin-Americans, have come to permeate the American political discourse as well as everyday conversations. Here I focus on how such expressions, which I call illegality frame code words (IFCW, for short), can be countered by recalcitrant hearers. I begin with the assumption that IFCWs are racial code (...) words, conversational devices that convey implicit racial appeals while allowing for deniability. I then discuss how the existence of an Illegality Frame in the American Immigration debate supports their deniability. Lastly, I discuss how recalcitrant hearers can counter utterances that contain them. In particular, I propose reframing as an adequate strategy. In reframing, agents take control of the goals or the QUD (question under discussion) of the conversation to exclude certain topics from the common ground and include others. The idea is to “change the conversation” to neutralize problematic moves. This maneuver is advantageous not only because it helps to hinder veiled discriminatory practices, but also because it affords control over “the terms of the conversation”. (shrink)

This article explores aspects of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption from the perspective of systems theory. Mosès, Pollock, and others have noted the systematic character of the Star. While “systematic” does not mean “systems theoretic,” the philosophical theology of the Star encompasses ideas that are salient in systems theory. The Magen David star to which the title refers, and which deeply structures Rosenzweig’s thought, fits the classic definition of “system” – a set of elements (God, World, Human) and relations between (...) the elements (Creation, Revelation, Redemption). The Yes and No of the elements and their reversals illustrate the bridging of element and relation with the third category of “attribute,” a notion also central to the definition of “system.” In the diachronics of “the All,” the relations actualize what is only potential in the elements in their primordial state and thus remedy the incompleteness of these elements, fusing them into an integrated whole. Incompleteness is a major theme of systems theory, which also explicitly examines the relations between wholes and parts and offers a formal framework for expressing such fusions. In this article, the systems character of Parts I & II of the Star is explored through extensive use of diagrams; a systems exploration of Part III is left for future work. Remarkably, given its highly architectonic character, diagrams are absent in Rosenzweig’s book, except for the triangle of elements, the triangle of relations, and the hexadic star, which are presented on the opening page of each part of the book. While structures can be explicated entirely in words, diagrams are a visual medium of communication that supplements words and supports a nonverbal understanding that structures both thought and experience. (shrink)

1. To list Pound’s triumphs of recognition in the realm of art, music, or literature is by itself no more enlightening than to catalog his oversights. Thus, for example, his instant and almost uncanny responsiveness to the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska is not more informative than his bizarre ranking of Francis Picabia’s paintings above those of Picasso or Matisse. Clearly it is essential to know, with as much specificity as possible, exactly what Pound said about a particular work of art (...) or literature and, equally important, given the frequent shifts of emphasis and interest throughout his long career, just when these opinions were first formulated. Like every reader of the The Cantos, I am conscious of the enormous service rendered by Pound scholars whose research is giving us a more complete inventory of the poet’s various statements and positions, and it would be foolish to take my point here as a derogation of such efforts. But a list, no matter how complete, is not an argument, and an inventory, no matter how scrupulously assembled, is not an explanation; a recurrent problem in Pound studies is that too often the compoilation of discrete items of information is seen as a sufficient answer to problems of interpretation and understanding. In other words, I think it essential that discussions of pound and the Visual Arts move beyond the quagmire resulting from still another frain-storm of “factual atoms” chronicling his various passions and dislikes.2. Far from implying, however, that we must therefore simply accept Pound’s brilliant discoveries and pass over his “howling blunders,” my position would emphasize the need to take his ideas seriously enough to confront them, to test them against the material to which they are a response and for which they often seek to provide an explanatory account. There are times, as I have argued in an analogous context, when it is less demeaning to give a man credit for his worst errors than to remove from him the capacity to err.3. What we require, I believe, is less a catalog of all of Pound’s specific statements about various artists, with each utterance assigned a positive or negative prefix depending upon our own personal and currently sanctioned hierarchy of values, than a careful study of the place of those statements in the logic and texture of Pound’s own work. The attempt to focus attention on The Cantos’ network of artistic references—its invocation of masterpieces and privileged moments of cultural achievement—will yield only trivial results unless the inner dynamic linking Pound’s various exampla and the actual role these play in the poem’s argument become clearer in the process. Michael André Bernstein, associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic and Prima della Rivoluzione , a volume of verse. He is currently completing a study of the Abject Hero and literary genealogy. His previous contribution to. (shrink)

A lot of work in metaphysics relies on linguistic analysis and intuitions. Do we want to know what sort of things there are or could be? Then let’s see what sort of things there must be in order for what we truthfully say to be true. Do we want to see whether x is distinct from y? Then let’s see whether there is any statement that is true of x but not of y. And so on. In this paper I (...) argue that this way of proceeding is full of traps and is bound to be pretty useless unless we already have a good idea of what sort of things there are, and of how we are going to count them. (shrink)

Russian classic writer Ivan Turgenev, analyzing the Russian reality of the second half of the 19th century, presented inside one work – novel Smoke – an anthropological review of society, showing a change in the speech styles of different layers of the population. The novel is dominated by the idea of a dialogue of cultures – an obvious dialogue of Western European and Russian culture, and no less obvious dialogue that took place within the multitude of Russian cultures: gentry’s and (...) common people’s, merchants’, raznochintsys’, and philistines’ cultures. In Turgenev’s novel, the sign of a new time is freely discussed opportunities of solving the problems that have arisen, fnding solutions not in a rational way but in the hope for suddenness and fortune. However, the ways of solving problems, regardless of the possibilities for their implementation, must be discussed, argued, and analyzed. Therefore, the novel intuitively shows the way of the birth of a parliament, which was absent inRussia at that time. The article demonstrates the importance of a rational, philosophical way of reasoning, which can become a life principle when words and deeds correspond with each other. Turgenev in some way – through different speech instances – stratifed the new generation, showing a new face of unstableRussia. The main driving force of many, if not all, of Turgenev’s novels is freedom and the words and deeds born by it. A previously unseen fgure of a revolutionary appears, expressing a new attitude to society and to power. Turgenev’s modernity and timeliness consists in fxing such a mentality in which the emphasis is placed on the metaphysical idea of the beginning: it exists, it receives an impetus – and there is almost no movement, everything is only projected, only utopized, turning the thinker into an odd man. And although not only the idea of freedom, but thefree state of a person is recognized as a historical fact, he emphasizes that Russian freedom was born without waking up. (shrink)

By means of a Kierkegaardian critique of postmodernism, Ronald L. Hall argues that the postmodernist flirtation with Kierkegaard ignores the existential import of his thought. Word and Spirit offers a novel interpretation of Kierkegaard's conception of the self, according to which spirit is essentially linked to the speech act. In an extended interpretation of Kierkegaard's Either/Or, Hall uses insights from Austin, Wittgenstein, Polanyi, and Poteat to fill out and explicate Kierkegaard's views in the context of modern language philosophy. The enriched (...) concept of the speech act represented by the Hebrew idea of dabhar frames Hall's critique of irony, romanticism, Don Giovanni, Faust, the demonic, music, and ultimately, postmodernisim in a Kierkegaardian mode. The result of the modern suspicion of speech, Hall concludes, is a demonic, musical spiritlessness. (shrink)

An interview of Amina Kkhelufi and Kseniia Myroshnyk with Tetiana Chaika, dedicated to the formation of the idea of an oral history of philosophy.

ABSTRACT This essay considers the implications of a shift in focus from ideas to practices in the history of alchemy. On the one hand, it is argued, this new attention to practice highlights the diversity of ways that early modern Europeans engaged alchemy, ranging from the literary to the entrepreneurial and artisanal, as well as the broad range of social and cultural spaces that alchemists inhabited. At the same time, however, recent work has demonstrated what most alchemists shared—namely, a (...) penchant for reading, writing, making, and doing, all at the same time. Any history of early modern alchemy, therefore, must attend to all of these practices, as well as the interplay among them. In this sense, alchemy offers a model for thinking and writing about early modern science more generally, particularly in light of recent work that has explored the intersection of scholarly, artisanal, and entrepreneurial forms of knowledge in the early modern period. (shrink)

At the center of Gauker's book stands two inter-connected theses: First, that concepts are dependent on language; second, that this requires rejecting the traditional idea that linguistic communication involves a transmission of thoughts. I argue that we cannot afford to reject the traditional conception of communication and that Gauker's alternative ‘cooperative' conception is unsatisfactory. However, I also argue that Gauker is wrong to suggest that the language dependency thesis of concepts is incompatible with the traditional view of communication.

To speak of the nature of an image is to initiate a problematic second only to that raised by considerations of the nature of language. To inquire into the relations between image and language is to step into a very old philosophical problem. Nevertheless, I would hope at least to approach the edge of such an encounter in the attempt to see what relevance it might have for recent past art. Certainly the term “image” has had a long and embattled (...) history. A taxonomy and a genealogy of the term might be in order. Do we wish to speak of mental images or of optical ones? What about perceptual images or the verbal images of descriptions and metaphors? To consider the sense data and appearances of the perceptual, or the dreams, fantasies, memories, and ideas of the mental image is to review an entire Western philosophical discourse. We might consider the issue of what may or may not be in the mind as an image; or the relation of visual images to linguistic terms; or the relation between objects and visual images that stand for them. Certainly the ways of formulating such relations have decided the divisions of Western metaphysics. Representational theories of the mind revolve around such issues and imply the persistent division of mind from body, subject from object.Let me say right away that my interests here are not to review an entire philosophical discourse with the hope of establishing a clarity of distinctions between the imagistic and the linguistic. Rather the assumption here is that the two are inextricably entangled, and the interest is to see how certain art in this century has resisted or embraced this entanglement. Robert Morris is an artist and a professor at Hunter College. A collection of his writings is forthcoming. (shrink)

This paper disputes the notion, endorsed by much of narrative theory, that the reading of literary narrative is functionally analogous to an act of communication, where communication stands for the transfer of thought and conceptual information. The paper offers a basic typology of the sensorimotor effects of reading, which fall outside such a narrowly communication-based model of literary narrative. A main typological distinction is drawn between those sensorimotor effects pertaining to the narrative qua verbal utterance (verbal presence) and those sensorimotor (...) effects pertaining to the imaginary physical world(s) of the story (direct presence). While verbal presence refers to the reader's vicarious perception of the voices of narrators and characters, direct presence refers to the emulated sensorimotor experience of the imaginary worlds that the narrators' and characters' utterances refer to. The paper further elaborates on how, by which kinds of narrative content and structure, direct presence may be prompted. The final section addresses some of the observational and historical caveats that must be attached to any theoretical inquiry made into the sensorimotor effects of reading. As a preliminary for further research, a few ideas about the model's potential for empirical validation are put forward. A brief, tentative history of the sensorimotor benefits of literary narrative reading is then outlined. (shrink)

In this essay, I will critically examine Collin Turbayne and Philip Wheelwright's approaches to the theory of metaphor. Through criticism of their views I will arrive at Paul Ricoeur's theory which I consider is the most comprehensive one. Ricoeur retains what is fruitful from the above mentioned theories and tries to make them part of a very ambitious project which is represented by his monumental work The Rule of Metaphor (1977). He manages to open a new dimension in the analysis (...) of metaphor by linking it through a special use of imagination to the phenomenal world, by according it the status of statement (redefining Frege's sense and reference polarity) and by pointing out the idea that metaphors have an emotional meaning as well. Thus, I will start with the two different views on this issue, first that of Collin Turbayne, who develops a theory of metaphor based on the "as if" prescription and thus brings the whole discussion on metaphor into the field of reflective judgment. Then there is Philip Weelwright's theory which considers that metaphorical language, through its fluidity and tensiveness, is closely connected to "what is", that is, to the real. Using these two theories as dialectical counterparts, I will try to bring them together in an act of synthesis, arriving finally at Paul Ricoeur's theory of metaphor. (shrink)

In one accessible, beautifully designed and illustrated volume, scholars have gathered the major theories and key ideas of world's greatest thinkers. The presentation of material sets this reference apart from other philosophy books by providing both the historical and cultural context of the ideas being explored, and by giving visual expression to the arguments and insights themselves through the artwork of the time. Immerse yourself in both Eastern and Western philosophy, spending time with Plato on knowledge, Aquinas on (...) ethics, Marx on religion, and Confucius on human destiny. Designed for maximum flexibility of use, all thinkers and issues are cross-referenced, enabling you to move within or across branches of philosophy and historical periods, to get either a broad overview of the whole world of philosophy, or a more detailed exploration of a particular thinker or approach. (shrink)

Both Bakhtin and Vygotsky, as we have seen, responded directly or indirectly to the challenge of Freud. Both attempted to account for their data without resorting to postulating an unconscious in the Freudian sense. By way of contrast, it is instructive here to recall Jacques Lacan—who, among others, has been a beneficiary of Bakhtin’s “semiotic reinterpretation” of Freud.17 Lacan’s case is intriguing, for he retains the unconscious while at the same time submitting Freudian psychoanalysis to rigorous criticism along the lines (...) of Bakhtin. By focusing attention on the dialogic word, he encourages a rereading of Freud in which the social element is crucial. As Lacan opens his essay “The Empty Word and the Full Word”:Whether it sees itself as an instrument of healing, of formation, or of exploration in depth, psychoanalysis has only a single intermediary: the patient’s Word….And every word calls for a reply.I shall show that there is no word without a reply, even if it meets no more than silence, provided that it has an auditor: this is the heart of its function in psychoanalysis.18The word is conceived as a tool not only in the external world but also of an autonomous internal world as well. And what emerges, it would seem, is a reinterpretation of the role of dialogue in the painful maturational process of the child. For Vygotsky, the child’s realization of his separateness from society is not a crisis; after all, his environment provides both the form and the content of his personality. From the start, dialogue reinforces the child’s grasp on reality, as evidenced by the predominantly social and extraverted nature of his earliest egocentric speech. For Lacan, on the contrary, dialogue seems to function as the alienating experience, the stade du miroir phase of a child’s development. The unconscious becomes the seat of all those problems that Bakhtin had externalized: the origin of personality, the possibilities of self-expression. The je-moi opposition in the mirror gives rise to that permanent for “a locus where there is constituted the je which speaks as well as he who has it speak.”19 And consequently, the Word takes on an entirely different coloration: it is no longer merely an ideological sign but a potent tool for repressing knowledge of that gap, the face in the mirror, the Other. Lacan’s celebrated inversion of Saussure’s algorithm, with the line between signifier and signified representing repression, created a powerful but ominous new role for language. The child is released from his alienating image only through discovering himself as Subject, which occurs with language; but this language will inevitably come to him from the Other. Thus speech is based on the idea of lack, and dialogue, on the idea of difference. 17. See Ivanov, “The Significance of M. M. Bakhtin’s Ideas,” p. 314.18. Jacques Lacan, “The Empty Word and the Full Word,” in Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Anthony Wilden , p. 9.19. Lacan, from “La Chose freudienne” , quoted in Wilden, “Lacan and the Discourse of the Other,” in Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, p. 266. Caryl Emerson, assistant professor of Russian literature at Cornell University, has translated The Dialogic Imagination, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics . She is currently at work, on a study of Boris Godunov in Russian cultural history. (shrink)

In this careful and fresh analysis of the relationships between facts, words and beliefs, the author attempts to clarify how images and words relate to the world so as to establish beliefs and support knowledge. The reader is first presented with the ontological background of the analysis, including the status of sense-data, the nature of universals and our experience of them, and the epistemological status of the world. Sprigge then turns to a discussion of semiotic background including pragmatic (...) and semantic meaning, and the nature of reference. After supplying these foundations, the heart of the book concentrates upon the act of believing with attention focused upon the idea of the image, and the distinction drawn between imagism, imagist-activism, and imagist-mentalism, the latter of which he supports. He also defends phenomenalism against the criticisms of Austin, while developing as well a doctrine of intentionality rooted in Findlay’s interpretation of Meinong. He offers an extensive critique of behaviorism leading to his imagist-mentalism position, while his analysis of belief takes serious issue with Russell. (shrink)

This book is at once a critique of modernity and postmodernism as well as an interpretation of Kierkegaard's conception of the self. The novelty of Hall's approach consists in his claim that spirit or the self is intimately connected with the first person speech act, which is represented by the Hebrew idea of dabhar. As Yahweh's word, dabhar "brings the world into existence and his fidelity sustains it". In this respect, God's primordial speech act, which is both word and deed, (...) serves as the paradigm of human existence itself. Hence, while speaking is regarded as the defining characteristic of human beings, owning and owning up to one's words--covenantal speech or reflexive integrity--alone determines what it is to be fully human. From this new point of view, Hall reads the first volume of Kierkegaard's Either/or, where Don Giovanni and Faust are featured, within the context of modern philosophy of language by using insights derived from Austin, Wittgenstein, Polanyi and Poteat. (shrink)

Incompletion is an essential condition of cultural history, and particularly the idea of the fragment became a central element of Romantic art. Through its resistance to classicist ideals it continued being of high relevance to the various strands of modernist and contemporary aesthetics. The fourteen essays in this volume, based on the 2017 Stockholm conference of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA), for the first time address incompletion in a wide range of literary and musical texts, from (...) Baudelaire and Flaubert through Tolstoy and Henry James to Bachmann, Jelinek and Janet Frame, from Nietzsche and Chopin through Russolo and Puccini to Rihm and Kurtàg. Two further essays deal with topical general issues in the field of word and music studies. (shrink)

This uniquely fascinating volume is not merely a learned treatise in historical semantics; it is itself a stupendous display of world harmony as a creed-a vivid demonstration that "all is all.".

This article explores the idea of film as a possible means for articulating original philosophical concepts, in Gilles Deleuze’s sense of concepts. The first of two parts, critically re-examines current ideas about film as philosophy in relation to Deleuze’s ideas on philosophy and cinema/art. It is common within the field of film-philosophy to trace back its central argument that film/cinema is capable of expressing original philosophy, to Deleuze’s cinema books. In and around these books, however, Deleuze did not (...) express such an idea and rather underlined sharp formal differences between cinematic thinking and philosophy. Cinematic thinking takes the form, he argues, of blocks of movement/duration whereas philosophy is defined as the art of creating concepts. Still, could a close critical scrutiny of and some creativity with Deleuze’s thought allow for taking a step he did not take? The second part of the article takes on the speculative question of whether it is possible to create a notion from within Deleuze’s thought as a whole, that allows for at least the theoretical possibility of articulating original philosophical concepts – as Deleuze defines them – in and through film, and what this would mean for our understanding of the concrete form of concepts. The article examines Deleuze’s concept of concepts, his descriptions of complicating intersections between philosophy and art, some partly conflicting statements on Godard over the years, aspects of his analyses of filmic thinking in Cinema 2 that can be seen to provide preliminary components for articulating concepts in and through film, and it discusses the place and function of words and texts in such filmic articulations. If the aim of the first part is to clarify Deleuze’s positions on film and philosophy the aim of the second part resonates with the Deleuzian/Nietzschean quest for formal renewal of philosophy. The overall aim is to re-problematize and provide subtle new means for conceiving of and discussing the notion of film as philosophy. (shrink)

Christopher Gauker argues that no concept can be extracted from perceptual experience and that imagistic thought cannot draw boundaries between one kind and another. Here, it is argued, on the contrary, that images have extension and are consequently Fregean concepts. Hume’s theory of abstraction as indifference is offered as an account of extra-sensory concepts. Finally, it is argued that modern theories of sensory data processing run parallel to Kant’s idea of synthesis as a pre-condition for perception.

Language comes so naturally to us that we are apt to forget what a strange and miraculous gift it is. Over the next hour you will sit in your chairs listening to a man make noise as he exhales. Why would you do such a thing? Not because the sounds are particularly melodious, but because the sounds convey information in the exact sequence of hisses and hums and squeaks and pops. As you recover the information, you think the thoughts that (...) I want you to think. Right now I am conveying ideas about language itself, but with a slightly different sequence of hisses and pops I could be talking about anything from theories of the origin of the universe to the latest plot twists in your favorite daytime drama. The fundamental scientific problem raised by language is to explain this vast expressive power. What is the trick behind our ability to fill each other’s heads with so many kinds of thoughts? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 1-20 [Access article in PDF] A Pedagogy of Two Ways of Seeing:A Confrontation of "Word and Image" in My Name is Red 1 Feride Çiçekoglu The novel of Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red, recently the center of controversy, not only in its homeland Turkey but in all the countries where it was translated, focuses on the debates around image-making in late (...) sixteenth-century Istanbul, then the Ottoman capital. It is also a contemporary tale. Its focus is not only the tradition of miniature painting during the Ottoman period in particular, but also the tradition of Western painting. Above all, My Name is Red is a detective and love story, starting with a murder and resolving the mystery at the end, like many other novels in this genre. What is unique is the role that the confrontation of different traditions of painting, Western and Islamic, and that between "word and image" play in the resolution of the love story and the solving of the mystery. The tradition of miniature painting, the illumination and illustration of narrative texts, which legitimized itself as the art of the book, may be interpreted as a way of dealing with the iconoclastic tradition of Islam. In this context, images are not seen as things-in-themselves but they are treated as "footnotes" even when the image seems to dominate the written word on the page. Image-making becomes an extension of the text, rather than an independent art. It serves the purposes of the words for a better understanding of the meaning, for a description of the aura of the narration, for the depiction of the images the reader of the story will paint in the mind's eye. Images, it has been said, do not represent real life; they are an externalization of the inner life. Thus, contrary to meaning and interpretation in Western art, the meaning in Islamic illumination is "inwards, converging on a private truth" rather than disclosing itself with an "outwards movement" 3Such a way of seeing is a totally different story than the discipline of art history traditionally allows: [End Page 1] the history of art, everywhere interlaced with the problems of representationalism, is in large part a commentary of the Western tradition upon itself, even if examples may be chosen from beyond its borders. Representationalism and its attendant problems are integral to the history of Western art, but not to the history of all art. 4Pamuk's novel provides a rich frame of reference for wandering in both traditions of image-making, Western and non-Western, which have seldom — if ever — been presented in the same framework. My Name is Red reconstructs two different ways of seeing in retrospect within the fictional atmosphere of late sixteenth-century Istanbul, weaving a rich panorama of the now lost tradition of Islamic illumination, faced by the "troubled notions of representation, naturalism, realism, and mimesis" due to the impact of Venetian painting. 5It is incidental that in the novel, the contradiction of traditions fails to liberate the imagery of the Ottoman miniatures from the pages of the books and from the yoke of the narrative text. Pamuk himself certainly does not wish to be seen or evaluated as writing from the viewpoint of "positivistrationality" from a teleological standpoint of "enlightenment." In his words, "I do not see it as: The miniaturists were going to be westernized if they were not prohibited by Islamic tradition." 6Pamuk is well aware of the fact that "Westernization of the West" isbased on the idea of the Renaissance as a "myth." 7 He finds it ironic that "this nineteenth-century myth of the Renaissance is still taken seriously by many people"; even more so in non-Western cultures, since "the West" itself is in a process of "de-Westernization" by demystifying the myth. 8 He cites Svetlana Alpers's The Art of Describing in this context, as a work which impressed and inspired him for... (shrink)

This paper considers an important recent contribution by Miguel Hernán to the ongoing debate about causal inference in epidemiology. Hernán rejects the idea that there is an in-principle epistemic distinction between the results of randomized controlled trials and observational studies: both produce associations which we may be more or less confident interpreting as causal. However, Hernán maintains that trials have a semantic advantage. Observational studies that seek to estimate causal effect risk issuing meaningless statements instead. The POA proposes a solution (...) to this problem: improved restrictions on the meaningful use of causal language, in particular “causal effect”. This paper argues that new restrictions in fact fail their own standards of meaningfulness. The paper portrays the desire for a restrictive definition of causal language as positivistic, and argues that contemporary epidemiology should be more realistic in its approach to causation. In a realist context, restrictions on meaningfulness based on precision of definition are neither helpful nor necessary. Hernán’s favoured approach to causal language is saved from meaninglessness, along with the approaches he rejects. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to reconstruct the classical Sāṁkhya view on the relationship between a word and its meaning. The study embraces all the extant texts of classical Sāṁkhya, but it is based mainly on the Yuktidīpikā, since this commentary contains most of the fragments which are directly related to the topic of our research. The textual analysis has led me to the following conclusion. It is possible to reconstruct two different and conflicting views on the relationship between (...) a word and its meaning from the classical Sāṁkhya texts. The first view, the source of which is the Yuktidīpikā, is that all words are conventional in their origin. It resembles the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika theory of the primary linguistic convention and the conventional origin of all words. The second view, which is the implication of the Sāṁkhya idea of the authorless Vedas we can reconstruct on the basis of the majority of the classical Sāṁkhya commentaries, is that the relationship between a word and its meaning is natural. This view is probably influenced by Mīmāṁsā. Both of these views are hardly compatible with the Sāṁkhya teaching. It seems like classical Sāṁkhya, not having created its own detailed theory, oscillated between different conceptions. (shrink)

The examination of names and words constitutes an important aspect of the philosophy of Zhuangzi. With the debate over the relationship between name and reality as its background, this examination not only involves the connection between form and meaning, but also targets at the connection between concepts and objects. The debate over the relationship between name and reality correlates with the discussion of the connection between words and meanings or ideas. For Zhuangzi, the function of names and (...) words is first and foremost embodied as the classification and distinction of being, while the Dao, as the universal principle of being, is characterized by equality and throughness. This leads to an inherent disparity and tension between names, words and the Dao. Zhuangzi℉s thinking and argument concern the connections between name and reality, words and ideas, and the Dao and words. This displays multiple theoretical perspectives and the complexity of its thought. (shrink)