Article 14 Chapter I ‘The State of Lithuania’ of the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania of 1992 reads as follows: ‘Lithuanian shall be the State language’. This principle is not new in the Lithuanian history of constitutionalization, as Lithuanian was the official language of the State in the interwar period but lost this status during the Soviet occupation. After 1988, when many political, economic and social changes crucial for further development of the State (...) took place in Lithuania, linguistic issues re-emerged. It was recognized back then that language played a vital role in the life of the State and the society, and the Lithuanian language was given back its status of the official language by the Constitution. The principle that Lithuanian is the official language of the State, enshrined in Article 14 of the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania, was further elaborated by the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania in its rulings and judgments. According to its official constitutional doctrine, the Lithuanian language should be treated as a very specific constitutional value, as it forms the basis of the ethnic and cultural identity of the Lithuanian nation and is the guarantor of the national identity and survival. The status of Lithuanian as the official language means that the Lithuanian language must be used in all spheres of public life. The Court also holds that having this principle enshrined in Chapter I ‘The State of Lithuania’ of the Constitution implies that the Lithuanian language enjoys particular protection since the provisions of this Chapter may be amended only by a referendum. (shrink)

Along with providing a translation into English of the last text Immanuel Kant published during his lifetime, Nachschrift eines Freundes, this essay provides a historical account of the context surrounding the writing and publishing of this postscript as well as the German-Lithuanian and Lithuanian-German dictionary that contains it. In addition, this essay discusses the intellectual-historical significance of Kants essay as a political intervention in the name of Lithuanians, their language, and their culture. Nachschrift eines Freundes demonstrates Kant (...) practicing some of the theoretical Enlightenment tenets that his philosophy espouses. (shrink)

The idea of the article was suggested by Lotman’s theory about two basic mechanisms of social behaviour — fear and shame. The presented paper aims at highlighting two other mechanisms of such kind — guilt and repentance. The novella Isaac (1960–61) by Antanas Škėma, the Lithuanian writer in exile, is about a Lithuanian patriot who kills a Jew called Isaac during the years of German occupation. The author’s fundamental conception implies that the real perpetrator of crime is not (...) a separate individual but the crowd representing the values of the society. Škėma’s interpretation of history demystifies the moral system in the inter-war Lithuania and proves it to be a collection of futile signs that fail to prevent society from falling into mass psychosis and following primitive impulses. The other Lithuanian novel, Leonardas Gutauskas’ Šešėliai (Shadows) written in 2000, focuses on the tense relationships between Lithuanians and Russians, suggesting that there are several moral systems determining the concepts of guilt-repentance. The Christian agricultural society embodies the ethics of individual responsibility. The domination of the Russian ethic code is associated with the separation of Churches and the strengthening of the Orthodox Church. A moral system based on harmony and aiming to reconcile the guilty and the innocent comes across as a sought ideal. Both novels discussed exemplify different modes of a liberating society. The first one is an account of the society’s effort to become free of the guilt complex and rethink its history. The second one articulates theguilt of the Russian nation against Lithuanians and fights russophobia at the same time. (shrink)

The idea of the article was suggested by Lotman’s theory about two basic mechanisms of social behaviour — fear and shame. The presented paper aims at highlighting two other mechanisms of such kind — guilt and repentance. The novella Isaac (1960–61) by Antanas Škėma, the Lithuanian writer in exile, is about a Lithuanian patriot who kills a Jew called Isaac during the years of German occupation. The author’s fundamental conception implies that the real perpetrator of crime is not (...) a separate individual but the crowd representing the values of the society. Škėma’s interpretation of history demystifies the moral system in the inter-war Lithuania and proves it to be a collection of futile signs that fail to prevent society from falling into mass psychosis and following primitive impulses. The other Lithuanian novel, Leonardas Gutauskas’ Šešėliai (Shadows) written in 2000, focuses on the tense relationships between Lithuanians and Russians, suggesting that there are several moral systems determining the concepts of guilt-repentance. The Christian agricultural society embodies the ethics of individual responsibility. The domination of the Russian ethic code is associated with the separation of Churches and the strengthening of the Orthodox Church. A moral system based on harmony and aiming to reconcile the guilty and the innocent comes across as a sought ideal. Both novels discussed exemplify different modes of a liberating society. The first one is an account of the society’s effort to become free of the guilt complex and rethink its history. The second one articulates theguilt of the Russian nation against Lithuanians and fights russophobia at the same time. (shrink)

There is a standard story told about the rise and fall of ordinary language philosophy: it was a widespread, if not dominant, approach to philosophy in Great Britain in the aftermath of World War II up until the early 1960s, but with the development of systematic approaches to the study of language—formal semantic theories on one hand and Gricean pragmatics on the other—ordinary language philosophy more or less disappeared. In this paper we present quantitative evidence to evaluate (...) the standard story of the rise and fall of ordinary language philosophy, building on the topic model of over 30,000 philosophy articles in Weatherson (2022). Using a combination of qualitative judgment and a topic-model-based measurement of similarity between individual articles, we find evidence that supports the first part of the standard story, according to which ordinary language philosophy arises in the 1940s, peaks between the early 1950s and the late 1960s, and then rapidly declines. But we argue that there is also evidence of a "new wave" of ordinary language philosophy in the early 21st century that defies the second part of the standard story. (shrink)

An appealing to original texts, a comparing linguistic variations in the forms of their offsprings (translations), a research of processes of branching of meanings, a reconstruction of the first-sense of texts, and especially those that were created centuries ago in ancient languages, that is enabling to improve translation or understanding of the history of the mentality of native and modern na- tive speakers — will always be relevant for any philological, linguistic and philosophical studies. This article is an attempt (...) to analyze and show how different the form and meaning of the same text can be in different languages and what can be common between different translations. For the first time, the comparison of the original fragments of Plato’s “The Republic” in Ancient Greek with their translations into Japanese and Korean translations has been done. Also, some fragments of Lithuanian, Latin, Latin and English translations are included. For the analysis, I propose the following two fragments of the text of the seventh book, namely the replica numbered 514a-514b of the dialogue of Socrates with Glaucon and the replica numbered 517b-517c. After all, in my opinion, there is the greatest concentration of philosophical terms associated with the myth of the cave, which interests me. (shrink)

In contemporary natural languages semantics one will often see the use of special brackets to enclose a linguistic expression, e.g. ⟦carrot⟧. These brackets---so-called denotation brackets or semantic evaluation brackets---stand for a function that maps a linguistic expression to its "denotation" or semantic value (perhaps relative to a model or other parameters). Even though this notation has been used in one form or another since the early development of natural language semantics in the 1960s and 1970s, Montague himself didn't make (...) use of this notation in his series of groundbreaking papers on semantics. That raises the question: When was the ⟦.⟧-notation introduced to semantics? This note answers that question. (shrink)

The program of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, formulated primarily by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, calls for relating conceptual change to structural transformations of government, society, and economy in German-speaking Europe. J. G. A. Pocock, of Cambridge, identified the range of alternative and competing political discourses available to early modern writers, while Quentin Skinner, also of Cambridge, treated political theories in terms of those historical contexts and linguistic conventions which both facilitate and circumscribe legitimations of political arrangements, and he (...) described such theories as intentional speech acts. Despite the differences in the German and Anglophone modes of treating political language, however, there are no major obstacles in bringing them together. The GG could profit from Pocock's technique of analysis and comparison in identifying early modern political languages, and the issues raised by Skinner about political thought and theorizing as forms of linguistic action, as well as the effect of general linguistic conventions upon available modes of legitimating political arrangements. The Anglophone mode might profit from considering the GG's non-reductive use of social history in conjunction with that of concepts, and from the GG's systematic use of contemporary sources of language and linguistic definitions. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to introduce Wittgenstein’s concept of the form of a language into geometry and to show how it can be used to achieve a better understanding of the development of geometry, from Desargues, Lobachevsky and Beltrami to Cayley, Klein and Poincaré. Thus this essay can be seen as an attempt to rehabilitate the Picture Theory of Meaning, from the Tractatus. Its basic idea is to use Picture Theory to understand the pictures of geometry. I (...) will try to show, that the historical evolution of geometry can be interpreted as the development of the form of its language. This confrontation of the Picture Theory with history of geometry sheds new light also on the ideas of Wittgenstein. (shrink)

This essay argues that Speech-Language Pathology emerged as a response to the early twentieth-century demand for docile, efficient, and thus productive speech. As the capacity of speech became more central to the industrial and democratic operations of modern society, an apparatus was needed to bring speech under the fold of biopower. Beyond simple economic productivity, the importance of SLP lies in opening the speaking subject up to management and normalization—creating, in short, biopolitical subjects of communication. We argue that SLP (...) accordingly emerged not as a discreet institution, but as a set of practices which can be clustered under three headings: calculating deviance, disciplining the tongue, and speaking the truth of pathologized subjects. (shrink)

This bibliographical guide gives a comprehensive overview of the historiography of philosophy and thought in the Japanese language through an extensive and thematically organized collection of relevant literature. Comprising over one thousand entries, the bibliography shows not only how extensive and complex the Japanese tradition of philosophical and intellectual historiography is, but also how it might be structured and analyzed to make it accessible to a comparative and intercultural approach to the historiography of philosophy worldwide. The literature is categorized (...) and organized according to thematic focus areas such as geographical regions and continents, nations or peoples, religious traditions and philosophical teachings such as Buddhism, Islam, Shintō, and Confucianism, as well as disciplines such as ethics, aesthetics, and political thought. The bibliography is accompanied by an introduction outlining the research method as well as quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyzing the material, followed by a chronological overview of the historiography of philosophy and thought in the Japanese language and of the Japanese tradition of writing “world histories of philosophy.” As a first step towards a “history of the historiography of philosophy” in non-European languages, we hope that this guide will provide a useful tool for interculturally oriented scholarship aimed at a non-Eurocentric and diversified historiography of philosophy in a global perspective. (Open access, see link below.). (shrink)

Theory and history combine in this book to form a coherent narrative of the debates on language and languages in the Western world, from ancient classic philosophy to the present, with a final glance at on-going discussions on language as a cognitive tool, on its bodily roots and philogenetic role.An introductory chapter reviews the epistemological areas that converge into, or contribute to, language philosophy, and discusses their methods, relations, and goals. In this context, the status of (...) language philosophy is discussed in its relation to the sciences and the arts of language. Each chapter is followed by a list of suggested readings that refer the reader to the final bibliography."About the author" Lia Formigari, Professor Emeritus at University of Rome, La Sapienza. Her publications include: "Language and Experience in XVIIth-century British Philosophy." Amsterdam & Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1988; "Signs, Science and Politics. Philosophies of Language in Europe 1700 1830." Amsterdam & Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1993; "La semiotique empiriste face au kantisme." Liege: Mardaga, 1994. (shrink)

This paper offers an epistemological reconstruction of the historical development of algebra from al-Khwrizm, Cardano, and Descartes to Euler, Lagrange, and Galois. In the reconstruction it interprets the algebraic formulas as a symbolic language and analyzes the changes of this language in the course of history. It turns out that the most fundamental epistemological changes in the development of algebra can be interpreted as changes of the pictorial form of the symbolic language of algebra. Thus the (...) paper develops further the method of reconstruction which the author introduced for the analysis of the development of geometry. (shrink)

The European Union policy is geared towards fostering the diversity of cultural expression in its member states. Globalisation, cosmopolitanism and increasing mobility of the population have been destroying the fundamental values of nation-based states. The preservation of the ethnicity of the nation is becoming an increasing challenge. In Lithuania, where ethnicity has deep roots, many prominent representatives of the Lithuanian national revival, cultural figures, philosophers and pedagogues have emphasised the importance of national culture and the development of national identity (...) in the educational space in order to preserve the foundations of the state and its future sovereignty. This is, therefore, becoming an important educational challenge. In 2009, the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport of the Republic of Lithuania adopted the “Strategy for the Development of Ethnic Culture in Educational Institutions”, which was specified in the action program in 2012. However, the modelling of civic education, especially the practical implementation process, faces challenges in the area of education, one of which is the lack of proper attention from participants in education and media. The empirical research reveals that the interest of Lithuanian youth in the history of the national and ethnic culture remains low. This shows that when implementing reforms in the country’s education system, it is appropriate to impart fundamental provisions of citizenship and nationality to the young generation in a consistent and attractive manner. The aim of the article is to present the expression of citizenship and nationality in the educational space of Lithuania and to provide guidelines for improvement of civic education based on research. (shrink)

Human biological memory systems have adapted to use technological artifacts to overcome some of the limitations of these systems. For example, when performing a difficult calculation, we use pen and paper to create and store external number symbols; when remembering our appointments, we use a calendar; when remembering what to buy, we use a shopping list. This chapter looks at the history of memory artifacts, describing the evolution from cave paintings to virtual reality. It first characterizes memory artifacts, memory (...) systems, and the two main functions such artifacts have, which are to aid individual users in completing memory tasks and as a cultural inheritance channel (section 2). It then outlines some of our first symbolic practices such as making cave paintings and figurines, and then moves on to outline several key developments in external representational systems and the artifacts that support these such as written language, numeral systems and counting devices, diagrams and maps, measuring devices, libraries and archives, photographs, analogue and digital computational artifacts, the World Wide Web, virtual reality, and smartphones (section 3). After that, it makes some brief points about the cumulative nature of the cultural evolution of memory artifacts and speculates about the possible future of memory artifacts, arguing that it is very difficult to look beyond an epistemological horizon of more than five years (section 4). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetics As First EthicsLevinas and the Alterity of Literary DiscourseHenry McDonald (bio)1Notwithstanding the considerable amount of scholarly attention paid since the 1980s to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy of “the other,” critics and theorists have generally approached the relation between ethics and aesthetics in his work warily. Although readings of poetry and fiction inspired by Levinas’s philosophy continue to grow at a rapid rate, arguments applying that philosophy to literary (...) and aesthetic theory have been few and tentatively advanced. Some critics have contended that Levinas was something of a Platonic moralist who “disparaged” and “denounced” art and literature as failing to conform to his idea of what was “ethical.”1 If there is a critical consensus on the issue, it would seem to be that Levinas believed that art and ethics are incompatible.2Based on the aesthetic writings that Levinas produced over a four-decade period, as well as on the role literature played in the genesis and development of his ethical philosophy, such assessments seem puzzling. A Lithuanian Jew who studied with Husserl and Heidegger in 1929–30, Levinas (1906–95) came to philosophy initially through literature, especially Russian literature and Shakespeare: “the whole of philosophy,” he said, “is only a meditation of Shakespeare.”3 In the first work of his philosophical maturity, Existence and Existents (1947), discussions of aesthetics and literature introduce and develop the notion of being as il y a (there is), an account which, in giving emphasis [End Page 15] to being’s “horror” (horreur), simultaneously critiques ontology and places ethics on a tragic basis.4 The il y a, along with its temporal counterpart, the entretemps (between times), introduced just one year later in “Reality and Its Shadow” (1948), are of particular importance to his writings on aesthetics, produced during a period from the 1940s through the 70s.5 The latter provide abundant evidence of the potential for ethical meaning, indeed transcendence, he attributed to the artwork, as in “The Poet’s Vision” (1956), in which he asserts: “Literature is the unique adventure of a transcendence beyond all the horizons of the world... the authenticity of art must herald an order of justice” [“The Poet’s Vision” 134, 137]. Although Levinas never completed anything approximating a “system of aesthetics,” it is nonetheless true that in pieces ranging from developed essays on literary theory and aesthetics to brief commentaries on dozens of literary figures and works, he gave substantive indications of the ways in which his radically nonconceptual, nonontological account of ethics might alter our understanding of the status of “the literary artwork.”Most crucial among those indications is the close connection he posited between the alterity, or otherness, of the artwork and its tragic nature, which he defined in terms of his antiontological accounts of “being” and especially “time” (entretemps, “between times”). As early as “Reality and Its Shadow,” Levinas proposed the thesis, extended in his later essays, that the alterity of art and literature was located not in any ontological or conceptual “beyond”—in a spiritual dimension “which sets itself up as knowledge of the absolute” [1]—but in the “interstices” of language [3], in the “between times” (entretemps) of its modes of temporality: which can be accessed only by way of “the tragic” in art. Time in Levinas’s aesthetics is signified diachronically, from within a region of diaspora. What Levinas terms “alterity,” or otherness, points not toward a privileged, interpersonal dimension freed from the problematics of modernity, but strives to expose the complicity between the West’s concept of rationality and its history of barbarism exemplified by the Holocaust, its history, as Levinas put it, of “National Socialism, Stalinism, the camps, the gas chambers, nuclear weapons, terrorism and unemployment.”6 Art and literature demonstrate a utopian, emancipatory potential in revealing the fissures and hidden pathways that run through the hegemonic structures and totalizing frameworks of modernity.A central aspect of such an aesthetics is its privileging of music and musicality, which Levinas shares with a more recent thinker and critic, Paul Gilroy.7 Like Gilroy, Levinas deploys “musicality,” which he characterizes as “writing in its significance without signifiers” [157] not just to “refute,” as Gilroy... (shrink)

The article outlines some aspects of the civil law in Lithuania, an Eastern European country, which underwent an essential transformation in the last decades. The author outlines the development of the Lithuanian civil law from the oldest written sources up to the adoption of the new Civil Code of the Republic of Lithuania in 2000. The author is critical about the denomination of Lithuania as a “new” state and draws attention to the history of Lithuanian law, which (...) spans hundreds of years. The article emphasizes the continuity of the legal tradition and the heterogeneity of law – the coexisting of several legal systems in the territory of one state. The article discusses the role of Roman Law in the legal system of Lithuania. Even though Roman Law has never been applied in Lithuania, the author argues that it nevertheless had an indirect influence on Lithuanian private law. Roman Law and Canonical Law were among the main sources while drafting the three codified acts, the Statutes of Lithuania, in 1529, 1566 and 1588. The knowledge of Roman Law acquired by lawyers at universities in other European countries was transmitted through drafting of the laws and the jurisdictional and administrative practices. (shrink)

This essay adopts a semiotic perspective focused on practices of communication, movement, and translation to examine the global impact of A. J. Greimas and his oeuvre. The linguist and semiotician’s lecture trips abroad, the number and provenance of international students in his Paris seminar, and the chronology and linguistic geography of translations of his work help describe, gauge, and explain the dissemination and development of his ideas throughout the world. His project has engendered distinctive appropriations and at times productive institutional (...) structures in a number of cultural and linguistic contexts, notably Romance, Anglo-American, Germanic, Russian, Lithuanian, and Chinese. The broader historical relations between France and other lands, and the extent of each society’s use of the French language have conditioned, fostered, or impeded responses to his proposals. The conclusion’s discussion of the relative importance of personal contacts, socio-historical context, and the sociolinguistic and pedagogical status of French for his international reception aims to contribute to general methodological debates in the history of science and ideas and in transnational history. (shrink)

In this witty and fascinating book, Premack examines arguments over whether humans are unique because we can talk.

For the first time in English, this anthology offers a comprehensive selection of primary sources in the history of philosophy of language. Beginning with a detailed introduction contextualizing the subject, the editors draw out recurring themes, including the origin of language, the role of nature and convention in fixing form and meaning, language acquisition, ideal languages, varieties of meanings, language as a tool, and the nexus of language and thought, linking them to representative texts. (...) The handbook moves on to offer seminal contributions from philosophers ranging from the pre-Socratics up to John Stuart Mill, preceding each major historical section with its own introductory assessment. With all of the most relevant primary texts on the philosophy of language included, covering well over two millennia, this judicious, and generous, selection of source material will be an indispensable research tool for historians of philosophy, as well as for philosophers of language, in the twenty-first century. A vital tool for researchers and contemporary philosophers, it will be a touchstone for much further research, with coverage of a long and varied tradition that will benefit today's scholars and enhance their awareness of earlier contributions to the field. (shrink)

The stunning debut of Jonathan Rée, the Simon Schama of philosophy. 'I See A Voice is a joy to read: bold, crisp in style, effortlessly erudite, slyly humorous, passionate and humane.' Roy Porter, Independent 'Rée writes with such clarity and elegance that his prose is a pleasure to read. His exploration of the world of the deaf demonstrates that their tragic deprivation of one sense illumines our understanding of the others. His study of sign language gives us unparalleled insight (...) into the nature of spoken language... this book is not only a fascinating history of the belated correction of our misperceptions of the deaf, but a demonstration that philosophy really can advance our understanding of the world and ourselves.' Anthony Storr, Literary Review 'Some philosophers take difficulty and try to make it simple, but Rée takes what is apparently mundane and undeniably everyday and makes it hard and wonderful. Reading his book, I had to sit at a table, with a pen and notebook, jotting down things I had never thought about before - asking myself how it was that I had lived with this commonsense all my life, yet never been in possession of its meanings... Rée treats philosophy the way Adam Phillips treats psychoanalysis: he scrutinises the everyday and the commonplace and charges them with significance. Psychoanalysis and the writings of Freud flood into his text, along with the poetry of Wordsworth, the writings of Proust, his own poignant memories of things past. The melancholy richness of his writing soaks up the culture of the late twentieth century: its emphasis on subjectivity and uncertainity; its sense of the individual; its receptivity to other forms; its confessionalism and belief in self scrutiny... in his passionate, fascinating philosophical history of language, deafness and the senses.' Nicci Gerrard, Observer. (shrink)

AS THE subtlest part of his see-saw strategy in the Cratylus, Socrates recites several dozen comic etymologies. One of their explicit lessons is that the founders of language were Heracliteans who concealed the ontology of flux in common names. Socrates gives the etymologies, he says, to illustrate the Heraclitean Cratylus's pronouncement that names are natural. The etymologies are bait for Cratylus, of course; they are meant to lure him into a defense of his dogma. But they are more than (...) a stratagem. The Socratic etymologies raise the question whether philosophy can escape the history of its language--a history perhaps of concealed ontology or the tyranny of sense-experience or the myths of one's forefathers. Philosophy as articulate falls under forces, multiple and hardly known, which shape linguistic meaning. A question for Socrates, which I would like to make my own, is the question whether metaphysical inquiry can appropriate the history of the languages in which it must subsist. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

Contemporary natural-language semantics began with the assumption that the meaning of a sentence could be modeled by a single truth condition, or by an entity with a truth-condition. But with the recent explosion of dynamic semantics and pragmatics and of work on non- truth-conditional dimensions of linguistic meaning, we are now in the midst of a shift away from a truth-condition-centric view and toward the idea that a sentence’s meaning must be spelled out in terms of its various roles (...) in conversation. This communicative turn in semantics raises historical questions: Why was truth-conditional semantics dominant in the first place, and why were the phenomena now driving the communicative turn initially ignored or misunderstood by truth-conditional semanticists? I offer a historical answer to both questions. The history of natural-language semantics—springing from the work of Donald Davidson and Richard Montague—began with a methodological toolkit that Frege, Tarski, Carnap, and others had created to better understand artificial languages. For them, the study of linguistic meaning was subservient to other explanatory goals in logic, philosophy, and the foundations of mathematics, and this subservience was reflected in the fact that they idealized away from all aspects of meaning that get in the way of a one-to-one correspondence between sentences and truth-conditions. The truth-conditional beginnings of natural- language semantics are best explained by the fact that, upon turning their attention to the empirical study of natural language, Davidson and Montague adopted the methodological toolkit assembled by Frege, Tarski, and Carnap and, along with it, their idealization away from non-truth-conditional semantic phenomena. But this pivot in explana- tory priorities toward natural language itself rendered the adoption of the truth-conditional idealization inappropriate. Lifting the truth-conditional idealization has forced semanticists to upend the conception of linguistic meaning that was originally embodied in their methodology. (shrink)

A generous postdoctoral grant from the Cohn Institute for History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University enabled this research. I conducted the very earliest stage of the work while holding a postdoctoral position at the Minerva Humanities Center and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at TAU, which I would also like very much to thank. Participants in the workshop of the School of Philosophy, Linguistics and Science Studies in TAU under the direction of (...) Professor Yossef Schwartz provided useful comments on an early draft. I reserve special thanks to Daniel Dovrat, Yiftah Elazar, Ori Belkind, Eyal Chowers, and Shaul Katzir for their perspicacious remarks and ongoing encouragement.When... (shrink)

'Updating Bertrand Russell for the 21st century... a cerebrally enjoyable survey, written with great clarity and touches of wit... The non-western section throws up some fascinating revelations' Sunday Times The story of philosophy is an epic tale: an exploration of the ideas, views and teachings of some of the most creative minds known to humanity. But since the long-popular classic Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, first published in 1945, there has been no comprehensive and entertaining, single-volume history (...) of this great intellectual journey. With his characteristic clarity and elegance A. C. Grayling takes the reader from the world-views and moralities before the age of the Buddha, Confucius and Socrates, through Christianity's dominance of the European mind to the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and on to Mill, Nietzsche, Sartre, and philosophy today. And, since the story of philosophy is incomplete without mention of the great philosophical traditions of India, China and the Persian-Arabic world, he gives a comparative survey of them too. Intelligible for students and eye-opening for philosophy readers, he covers epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, logic, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, political philosophy and the history of debates in these areas of enquiry, through the ideas of the celebrated philosophers as well as less well-known influential thinkers. He also asks what we have learnt from this body of thought, and what progress is still to be made. The first authoritative and accessible single-volume history of philosophy for decades, remarkable for its range and clarity, this is a landmark work. (shrink)

The history of science can be better understood against the background of a history of knowledge comprising not only theoretical but also intuitive and practical knowledge. This widening of scope necessitates a more concise definition of the concept of knowledge, relating its cognitive to its material and social dimensions. The history of knowledge comprises the history of institutions in which knowledge is produced and transmitted. This is an essential but hitherto neglected aspect of cultural evolution. Taking (...) this aspect into account one is led to the concept of extended evolution, which integrates the perspectives of niche construction and complex regulative networks. The paper illustrates this concept using four examples: the emergence of language, the Neolithic revolution, the invention of writing and the origin of mechanics. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

17 essays discussing the role of language in the history of western thought. Since Adam before the Fall named the animals by true insight into their essences, language has never ceased to be the pivot of efforts to understand human nature and our capacity to feel at home in the twin worlds of nature and society. This volume brings together seventeen essays that have appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideasover the last thirty years. (...) Their common theme is the role of language in aspects of the history of western thought from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. The essays cover questions in epistemology, religion, anthropology, lexicography, evolution, the theory of signs, and the origin of language. Contributors: FRANK L. BORCHARDT, MARGRETA DE GRAZIA, SIDONIE CLAUSS, JAN MIEL, THOMAS C.SINGER, VICTOR ANTHONY RUDOWSKI, JULES PAUL SEIGEL, JAMES McLAVERTY, J.R. KNOWLSON, STEPHEN K. LAND, LIA FORMIGARI, H.J. JACKSON, W. JAY REEDY, V.P. BYNACK, CYMBRE QUINCYRAUB, MICHAEL SPRINKER, S. MORRIS ENGEL. (shrink)

(1999). Towards a 'Comparative History of the Foundations of Science': Language and Logic in Traditional China. Annals of Science: Vol. 56, No. 4, pp. 451-460.

The importance of the Low Countries as a centre for the study of foreign languages is well-known. The mutual relationship between the Dutch grammatical tradition and the Western European context has, however, been largely neglected. In this collection of papers on the history of linguistics in the Low Countries the editors have made an effort to present the Dutch tradition in connection with that of the neighbouring countries. Three articles by Claes, Dibbets and Klifman deal with the earliest stages (...) of the development of a grammar for the Dutch vernacular. Several important European figures worked in the Low Countries; their contribution to linguistics is discussed in articles on Vossius (Rademaker), Spinoza (Klijnsmit), and one of the most original phoneticians of European linguistics, Montanus (Hulsker). Vivian Salmon's article is a survey on the relations between English and Dutch linguistics in the field of foreign language teaching. In the 19th century Dutch linguistics had a special relationship with German general and historical linguistics; four articles deal with this period (Jongeneelen, van Driel, le Loux-Schuringa, Noordegraaf). Finally, there are three articles by Kaldewij, Hagen and van Els/Knops on the development of three branches of linguistics in the 20th century: structuralism, dialectology and applied linguistics. This volume should be of interest for all specialists in the history of linguistics in Europe, who are interested in the interdependence of the various traditions. (shrink)

The book is a history of the concept of experience in philosophy. Minakov focuses mainly on Western 19-20th century philosophical movements and their use of the experience concept. Author uses topological method to describe growth of the conseptual content of experience, as well as decline in its use in the end of 20th century.

Language and thought are intimately related: philosophers have long debated how a given language may condition the oral and written expression of thought. The language chosen to communicate scientific discoveries may facilitate or impede international access to such knowledge. Vector and message may become intertwined in ways not yet fully understood: comparing and contrasting dictionary definitions of key terms, such as the Humboldtian Weltansicht, may provide useful insights into this process. Semantic prosody, a linguistic phenomenon brought to (...) light by corpus linguistics through the analysis of ever vaster corpora, may have unsuspected and even unconscious impacts on the perception of a message. A case study of data from WebsTerre, a diachronic corpus of geological English, explores a twentieth-century Kuhnian paradigm shift in Earth Science, from continental drift to plate tectonics, to demonstrate how interactions between semantic prosody and translation have the potential to alter the history of science. (shrink)