Echolalias

Author: Daniel Heller-Roazen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
A far-reaching philosophical investigation into the persistence and disappearance of speech, in individuals and in linguistic communities. Just as speech can be acquired, so can it be lost. Speakers can forget words, phrases, even entire languages they once knew; over the course of time peoples, too, let go of the tongues that were once theirs, as languages disappear and give way to the others that follow them. In Echolalias, Daniel Heller-Roazen reflects on the many forms of linguistic forgetfulness, offering a far-reaching philosophical investigation into the persistence and disappearance of speech. In twenty-one brief chapters, he moves among classical, medieval, and modern culture, exploring the interrelations of speech, writing, memory, and oblivion. Drawing his examples from literature, philosophy, linguistics, theology, and psychoanalysis, Heller-Roazen examines the points at which the transience of speech has become a question in the arts, disciplines, and sciences in which language plays a prominent role. Whether the subject is Ovid, Dante, or modern fiction, classical Arabic literature or the birth of the French language, structuralist linguistics or Freud's writings on aphasia, Heller-Roazen considers with clarity, precision, and insight the forms, the effects, and the ultimate consequences of the forgetting of language. In speech, he argues, destruction and construction often prove inseparable. Among peoples, the disappearance of one language can mark the emergence of another; among individuals, the experience of the passing of speech can lie at the origin of literary, philosophical, and artistic creation. From the infant's prattle to the legacy of Babel, from the holy tongues of Judaism and Islam to the concept of the dead language and the political significance of exiled and endangered languages today, Echolalias traces an elegant, erudite, and original philosophical itinerary, inviting us to reflect in a new way on the nature of the speaking animal who forgets.

The Inner Touch

Author: Daniel Heller-Roazen
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9781890951771
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
An original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into the sense of being sentient--what it means to feel that one is alive--that draws on philosophical, literary, psychological, and medical accounts from ancient, medieval, and modern cultures.

Dark Tongues

Author: Daniel Heller-Roazen
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9781935408338
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
An exploration of secret languages, moving among hermetic artificial tongues as diverse as criminal jargons and divine speech. Dark Tongues constitutes a sustained exploration of a perplexing fact that has never received the attention it deserves. Wherever human beings share a language, they also strive to make from it something new: a cryptic idiom, built from the grammar that they know, which will allow them to communicate in secrecy. Such hidden languages come in many shapes. They may be playful or serious, children's games or adults' work. They may be as impenetrable as foreign tongues, or slightly different from the idioms from which they spring, or barely perceptible, their existence being the subject of uncertain, even unlikely, suppositions. The first recorded jargons date to the time of the Renaissance, when writers across Europe noted that obscure languages had suddenly come into use. A varied cast of characters--lawyers, grammarians, and theologians--denounced these new forms of speech, arguing that they were tools of crime, plotted in tongues that honest people could not understand. Before the emergence of these modern jargons, however, the artificial twisting of languages served a different purpose. In epochs and regions as diverse as archaic Greece and Rome and medieval Provence and Scandinavia, singers and scribes also invented opaque varieties of speech. They did so not to defraud, but to reveal and record a divine thing: the language of the gods, which poets and priests alone were said to master. Dark Tongues moves among these various artificial and hermetic tongues. From criminal jargons to sacred idioms, from Saussure's work on anagrams to Jakobson's theory of subliminal patterns in poetry, from the arcane arts of the Druids and Biblical copyists to the secret procedure that Tristan Tzara, founder of Dada, believed he had uncovered in Villon's songs and ballads, Dark Tongues explores the common crafts of rogues and riddlers, which play sound and sense against each other.

The Neurolinguistics of Bilingualism

Author: Franco Fabbro
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1134840144
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
This book introduces the reader to both neurolinguistics per se and the neuropsychological aspects of bilingualism. Neurolinguistics may roughly be defined as a subset of neuropsychology, namely the study of the representation and processing of language in the brain. To this effect, the first chapters of the book focus on the basic neuropsychology of language processing and acquisition. The second half of the book addresses the issues of cerebral representation and processing of language in bi-or multilingual subjects. All aspects are systematically dealt with, namely the definition of bilingualism; an analysis of all the issues related to bilingual aphasia, i.e. patterns of recovery of the patients' carious languages in diverse population; an investigation of the methodologies used in the study of the neuropsychological aspects of the various linguistic functions, such as comprehension, production and translation; and lastly, the issues of cerebral lateralization and neuroanatomical localization of the numerous cortical and subcortical structures subserving the various language system components in multilingual subjects. It is an excellent introduction to both the neuropsychology of language and the phenomena related to bilingualism. This book will be of particular interest to students of language therapy, aphasiology, applied psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and, in general, to students of medicine who wish to become more knowledgeable about the specific needs of patients in a multilingual society.

Absentees

Author: Daniel Heller-Roazen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1942130481
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
An intellectually adventurous account of the role of nonpersons that explores their depiction in literature and challenges how they are defined in philosophy, law, and anthropology In thirteen interlocking chapters, Absentees explores the role of the missing in human communities, asking an urgent question: How does a person become a nonperson, whether by disappearance, disenfranchisement, or civil, social, or biological death? Only somebody can become a “nobody,” but, as Daniel Heller-Roazen shows, the ways of being a nonperson are as diverse and complex as they are mysterious and unpredictable. Heller-Roazen treats the variously missing persons of the subtitle in three parts: Vanishings, Lessenings, and Survivals. In each section and with multiple transhistorical and transcultural examples, he challenges the categories that define nonpersons in philosophy, ethics, law, and anthropology. Exclusion, infamy, and stigma; mortuary beliefs and customs; children’s games and state censuses; ghosts and “dead souls” illustrate the lives of those lacking or denied full personhood. In the archives of fiction, Heller-Roazen uncovers figurations of the missing—from Helen of Argos in Troy or Egypt to Hawthorne’s Wakefield, Swift’s Captain Gulliver, Kafka’s undead hunter Gracchus, and Chamisso’s long-lived shadowless Peter Schlemihl. Readers of The Enemy of All and No One’s Ways will find a continuation of those books’ intense intellectual adventures, with unexpected questions and arguments arising every step of the way. In a unique voice, Heller-Roazen’s thought and writing capture the intricacies of the all-too-human absent and absented.

No One's Ways

Author: Daniel Heller-Roazen
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1935408887
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
From Homer's Outis—“No One,” or “Non-One,” “No Man,” or “Non-Man”—to “soul,” “spirit,” and the unnamable. Homer recounts how, trapped inside a monster's cave, with nothing but his wits to call upon, Ulysses once saved himself by twisting his name. He called himself Outis: “No One,” or “Non-One,” “No Man,” or “Non-Man.” The ploy was a success. He blinded his barbaric host and eluded him, becoming anonymous, for a while, even as he bore a name. Philosophers never forgot the lesson that the ancient hero taught. From Aristotle and his commentators in Greek, Arabic, Latin, and more modern languages, from the masters of the medieval schools to Kant and his many successors, thinkers have exploited the possibilities of adding “non-” to the names of man. Aristotle is the first to write of “indefinite” or “infinite” names, his example being “non-man.” Kant turns to such terms in his theory of the infinite judgment, illustrated by the sentence, “The soul is non-mortal.” Such statements play major roles in the philosophies of Maimon, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Hermann Cohen. They are profoundly reinterpreted in the twentieth century by thinkers as diverse as Carnap and Heidegger. Reconstructing the adventures of a particle in philosophy, Daniel Heller-Roazen seeks to show how a grammatical possibility can be an incitement for thought. Yet he also draws a lesson from persistent examples. The philosophers' infinite names all point to one subject: us. “Non-man” or “soul,” “Spirit” or “the unconditioned,” we are beings who name and name ourselves, bearing witness to the fact that we are, in every sense, unnamable.

Linguistic Disorders and Pathologies

Author: Gerhard Blanken
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110203375
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 978

Book Description
This handbook is geared towards the following aims: Reviewing the state of research on disordered language perception and production in adults and children. Describing and discussing present attempts at modelling human language processing by using linguistic disorders and pathologies as a data base. Presenting diagnostic and therapeutic concepts. Pointing out gaps and inconcistencies in current knowledge and theories. In bringing together knowlegde of different sources and disciplines under a common roof, the editors have achieved a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in the field of language pathology. Because of the diversity of the disciplines contributing to this scientific field, the chapters differ clearly in theories and methodologies. Yet this handbook represents a clear and common interdisciplinary contribution to linguistic disorders and pathologies and, furthermore, demonstrates the amount of interdisciplinary interaction still required. We chose this title in order to encompass as broadly as possible abnormalities and alterations of language perception, comprehension and production in adults and children, including nonpathological disorders. This handbook will be of interest to anybody involved with disordered language and/or language and speech disturbances, such as linguists and psychologists working in related research areas or teaching related subjects, scientists analyzing and modelling linguistic and cognitive processes (e.g. in Cognitive Psychology, Psycholinguistics, Neurolinguistics, Neuropsychology, Behavioural Neurology, Artificial Intelligence Research, and Cognitive Science), clinicians dealing with aquired or developmental language disorders, and speech pathologists and therapists. Besides presenting the state of the art, the handbook provides rich bibliographical information for research workers, clinicians, and advanced students.

How Logic Works

Author: Hans Halvorson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691208719
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
A concise introduction to logic that teaches you not only how reasoning works, but why it works How Logic Works is an introductory logic textbook that is different by design. Rather than teaching elementary symbolic logic as an abstract or rote mathematical exercise divorced from ordinary thinking, Hans Halvorson presents it as the skill of clear and rigorous reasoning, which is essential in all fields and walks of life, from the sciences to the humanities—anywhere that making good arguments, and spotting bad ones, is critical to success. Instead of teaching how to apply algorithms using “truth trees,” as in the vast majority of logic textbooks, How Logic Works builds on and reinforces the innate human skills of making and evaluating arguments. It does this by introducing the methods of natural deduction, an approach that teaches students not only how to carry out a proof and solve a problem but also what the principles of valid reasoning are and how they can be applied to any subject. The book also allows students to transition smoothly to more advanced topics in logic by teaching them general techniques that apply to more complicated scenarios, such as how to formulate theories about specific subject matter. How Logic Works shows that formal logic—far from being only for mathematicians or a diversion from the really deep questions of philosophy and human life—is the best account we have of what it means to be rational. By teaching logic in a way that makes students aware of how they already use it, the book will help them to become even better thinkers. Offers a concise, readable, and user-friendly introduction to elementary symbolic logic that primarily uses natural deduction rather than algorithmic “truth trees” Draws on more than two decades’ experience teaching introductory logic to undergraduates Provides a stepping stone to more advanced topics

The Chinese Pleasure Book

Author: Michael Nylan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1942130163
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
This book takes up one of the most important themes in Chinese thought: the relation of pleasurable activities to bodily health and to the health of the body politic. Unlike Western theories of pleasure, early Chinese writings contrast pleasure not with pain but with insecurity, assuming that it is right and proper to seek and take pleasure, as well as experience short-term delight. Equally important is the belief that certain long-term relational pleasures are more easily sustained, as well as potentially more satisfying and less damaging. The pleasures that become deeper and more ingrained as the person invests time and effort to their cultivation include friendship and music, sharing with others, developing integrity and greater clarity, reading and classical learning, and going home. Each of these activities is explored through the early sources (mainly fourth century BC to the eleventh century AD), with new translations of both well-known and seldom-cited texts.

Dictionary of Untranslatables

Author: Barbara Cassin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400849918
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1339

Book Description
Characters in some languages, particularly Hebrew and Arabic, may not display properly due to device limitations. Transliterations of terms appear before the representations in foreign characters. This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy—or any—translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen languages, terms such as Dasein (German), pravda (Russian), saudade (Portuguese), and stato (Italian) are thoroughly examined in all their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural complexities. Spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods, these are terms that influence thinking across the humanities. The entries, written by more than 150 distinguished scholars, describe the origins and meanings of each term, the history and context of its usage, its translations into other languages, and its use in notable texts. The dictionary also includes essays on the special characteristics of particular languages--English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Originally published in French, this one-of-a-kind reference work is now available in English for the first time, with new contributions from Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more.The result is an invaluable reference for students, scholars, and general readers interested in the multilingual lives of some of our most influential words and ideas. Covers close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms that defy easy translation between languages and cultures Includes terms from more than a dozen languages Entries written by more than 150 distinguished thinkers Available in English for the first time, with new contributions by Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more Contains extensive cross-references and bibliographies An invaluable resource for students and scholars across the humanities