A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year

A major new work by Charles Taylor: the long-awaited follow-up to The Language Animal, exploring the Romantic poetics central to his theory of language.

The Language Animal, Charles Taylor's 2016 account of human linguistic capacity, was a revelation, toppling scholarly conventions and illuminating our most fundamental selves. But, as Taylor noted in that work, there was much more to be said. Cosmic Connections continues Taylor's exploration of Romantic and post-Romantic responses to disenchantment and innovations in language.

Reacting to the fall of cosmic orders that were at once metaphysical and moral, the Romantics used the symbols and music of poetry to recover contact with reality beyond fragmented existence. They sought to overcome disenchantment and groped toward a new meaning of life. Their accomplishments have been extended by post-Romantic generations into the present day. Taylor's magisterial work takes us from Hölderlin, Novalis, Keats, and Shelley to Hopkins, Rilke, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, and on to Eliot, Milosz, and beyond.

In seeking deeper understanding and a different orientation to life, the language of poetry is not merely a pleasurable presentation of doctrines already elaborated elsewhere. Rather, Taylor insists, poetry persuades us through the experience of connection. The resulting conviction is very different from that gained through the force of argument. By its very nature, poetry's reasoning will often be incomplete, tentative, and enigmatic. But at the same time, its insight is too moving--too obviously true--to be ignored.

We have been given a powerful and often uplifting vision of what it is to be truly human. --John Cottingham, The Tablet

In seminal works ranging from Sources of the Self to A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has shown how we create possible ways of being, both as individuals and as a society. In his new book setting forth decades of thought, he demonstrates that language is at the center of this generative process.

For centuries, philosophers have been divided on the nature of language. Those in the rational empiricist tradition--Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, and their heirs--assert that language is a tool that human beings developed to encode and communicate information. In The Language Animal, Taylor explains that this view neglects the crucial role language plays in shaping the very thought it purports to express. Language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning and fundamentally shapes human experience. The human linguistic capacity is not something we innately possess. We first learn language from others, and, inducted into the shared practice of speech, our individual selves emerge out of the conversation.

Taylor expands the thinking of the German Romantics Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt into a theory of linguistic holism. Language is intellectual, but it is also enacted in artistic portrayals, gestures, tones of voice, metaphors, and the shifts of emphasis and attitude that accompany speech. Human language recognizes no boundary between mind and body. In illuminating the full capacity of the language animal, Taylor sheds light on the very question of what it is to be a human being.

Noam Chomsky is widely known and deeply admired for being the founder of modern linguistics, one of the founders of the field of cognitive science, and perhaps the most avidly read political theorist and commentator of our time. In these lectures, he presents a lifetime of philosophical reflection on all three of these areas of research, to which he has contributed for over half a century.

In clear, precise, and nontechnical language, Chomsky elaborates on fifty years of scientific development in the study of language, sketching how his own work has implications for the origins of language, the close relations that language bears to thought, and its eventual biological basis. He expounds and criticizes many alternative theories, such as those that emphasize the social, the communicative, and the referential aspects of language. Chomsky reviews how new discoveries about language overcome what seemed to be highly problematic assumptions in the past. He also investigates the apparent scope and limits of human cognitive capacities and what the human mind can seriously investigate, in the light of history of science and philosophical reflection and current understanding. Moving from language and mind to society and politics, he concludes with a searching exploration and philosophical defense of a position he describes as libertarian socialism, tracing its links to anarchism and the ideas of John Dewey and even to the ideas of Marx and Mill, demonstrating its conceptual growth out of our historical past and urgent relation to matters of the present.

Everything is getting more complex. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of information we encounter each day. Whether at work, at school, or in our personal endeavors, there's a deepening (and inescapable) need for people to work with and understand information.

Information architecture is the way that we arrange the parts of something to make it understandable as a whole. When we make things for others to use, the architecture of information that we choose greatly affects our ability to deliver our intended message to our users.We all face messes made of information and people.

This book defines the word mess the same way that most dictionaries do: A situation where the interactions between people and information are confusing or full of difficulties. - Who doesn't bump up against messes made of information and people every day?

How to Make Sense of Any Mess provides a seven step process for making sense of any mess. Each chapter contains a set of lessons as well as workbook exercises architected to help you to work through your own mess.

Pinpoints how dogwhistles and figleaves, two kinds of linguistic trick, distort political discourse and normalize racism

It is widely accepted that political discourse in recent years has become more openly racist and more accepting of wildly implausible conspiracy theories. Dogwhistles and Figleaves explores ways in which such changes--both of which defied previously settled norms of political speech--have been brought about. Jennifer Saul shows that two linguistic devices, dogwhistles and figleaves, have played a crucial role. Some dogwhistles (such as 88, used by Nazis online to mean Heil Hitler) serve to disguise messages that would otherwise be rejected as unacceptable, allowing them to be transmitted surreptitiously. Other dogwhistles (like the 1988 Willie Horton ad) work by influencing people in ways that they are not aware of, and which they would likely reject were they aware. Figleaves (such as just asking questions) take messages that could easily be recognized as unacceptable, and provide just enough cover that people become more willing to accept them. Saul argues that these devices are important for the spread of racist discourse. She also shows how they contribute to the transmission of norm-violating discourse more generally, focusing on the case of wildly implausible conspiracist speech. Together, these devices have both exploited and widened existing divisions in society, and normalized racist and conspiracist speech. This book is the first full-length exploration of dogwhistles and figleaves. It offers an illuminating and disturbing view of the workings of contemporary political discourse.

What sorts of alien languages can there be? And might reality be such that some alien language represents reality better than familiar languages do? Alien languages are here languages that use different kinds of semantic tools than any familiar languages use. The question of the existence of alien languages is interesting in itself: what kinds of languages are possible? But attending to the issue of alien languages also problematizes the relationship between language and reality, and highlights the possibility that reality could have a fundamentally different structure than we otherwise take it to have. Despite the foundational significance of these questions, they have received virtually no explicit attention in the literature. But the book brings up and criticizes existing contemporary work that promises to be at least indirectly relevant. A main claim of the book is that alien languages are possible and that we should be alert to the possibility that reality has alien structure and is best described by an alien language. The book also raises other possibilities regarding this debate. Maybe we should not say that the world has either kind of structure but can be equally well described using either kind of language.

Manual de dial ctica, ret rica y l gica aplicada, que es a la vez, como el texto mismo lo demuestra, una herramienta efectiva para acabar con el sofista, desmontar y anular los artilugios ret ricos con los que el demagogo, el charlat n, el pol tico y toda la caterva de embaucadores del discurso ejecutan su enga o.

Noam Chomsky is widely known and deeply admired for being the founder of modern linguistics, one of the founders of the field of cognitive science, and perhaps the most avidly read political theorist and commentator of our time. In these lectures, he presents a lifetime of philosophical reflection on all three of these areas of research, to which he has contributed for over half a century.

In clear, precise, and nontechnical language, Chomsky elaborates on fifty years of scientific development in the study of language, sketching how his own work has implications for the origins of language, the close relations that language bears to thought, and its eventual biological basis. He expounds and criticizes many alternative theories, such as those that emphasize the social, the communicative, and the referential aspects of language. Chomsky reviews how new discoveries about language overcome what seemed to be highly problematic assumptions in the past. He also investigates the apparent scope and limits of human cognitive capacities and what the human mind can seriously investigate, in the light of history of science and philosophical reflection and current understanding. Moving from language and mind to society and politics, he concludes with a searching exploration and philosophical defense of a position he describes as libertarian socialism, tracing its links to anarchism and the ideas of John Dewey and even to the ideas of Marx and Mill, demonstrating its conceptual growth out of our historical past and urgent relation to matters of the present.

Learn something new about yourself and others with the award-winning and world's most popular book of Afghan Proverbs. Now in a Third Edition that includes 50 additional Bonus Proverbs contributed by Afghans from across the globe. Beautifully illustrated by Afghan high school students in a unique collaboration with an American naval officer. Foreword by General David H. Petraeus (U.S. Army, Ret), one of the top 4-star generals in American military history and a user of Afghan Proverbs himself. Bilingual in Dari and English, including transliterations for easy reading and pronunciation. Collected and translated in Afghanistan by U.S. Navy Captain and Dari speaker Edward Zellem, winner of 9 international book awards for 3 books of Afghan Proverbs published in 15 languages. Afghans have used proverbs since ancient times to build bridges and understanding between peoples and cultures. Zarbul Masalha (Proverbs in Dari and Farsi) now brings that tradition to the entire world.

It has been now two hundred thirty-one years since Edmund Burke wrote of the materialistic revolutionaries in France: The age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. The passage of time has long since rendered the verdict that those were vatic words rather than reactionary contrivances, nearer to the spirit of Cassandra than to those of the last Pisistratids.

In A Slow Death or, The Silence of the Old World, Alexander Ford and Jack Parnell unveil a no-holds-barred assault on the citadels of Burke's sophists, revealing that modernism and all of its progeny are essentially linguistic phenomena. What emerges from two centuries of academic haze is a lucid and elemental picture of the metaphysical disposition which defined the pre-industrial world. In this collection of swift essays and striking aphorisms, Nietzsche and Cioran talk to priests, Wittgenstein and Dugina face the eschaton, Krier and Evola critique consumerism, and Soviet and American Housing are haunted by the spirits of the home. A Slow Death is a dramatic confrontation too long in the making, an urgent questioning, and a radical answering.

This book explores three connected insights into humor. First, that humor provides a privileged access to the deepest kind of truth, the sense as such of its topics and so of their very reality. It is argued that humor allows us to see things afresh and truly by flouting the sense of the things it deals with so enabling us to step outside of our taken for granted immersion in that sense. As a result, the character of the true sense stands out against the contrast of its nonsensical distortion. Second, that because of the way humor accesses truth, it also brings out the essential meaning of relevant value including the good and the worthwhile. Third, humor enables a privileged coordination and negotiation of profoundly conflicting truths and values. Humor's access to truth is privileged both in its depth, even with respect to metaphysics, and also because it establishes the truth of what it shows.

Humor's Privileged Access to Truth, Meaning, and Goodness is essential reading for all scholars and researchers of the philosophy of humor.

Austinian Themes offers a reconstruction of philosophical views on several themes developed by J. L. Austin. Exploring Austin's work in detail through a series of thematically organized chapters, Marina Sbisà draws on both published work as well as unpublished manuscript notes to offer a defence of Austin's speech act theory, characterized by a specific notion of illocution, against some important criticisms. Sbisà offers a reconstruction of Austin's responsibility-based conception of action drawing on his remarks on acts and actions in How to Do Things with Words and in later papers. Exploring Austin's contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of perception (including his realist stance, anti-scepticism, and presentational view of perception), Sbisà analyses the roles that he assigns to knowledge in the dynamics of assertion. On the theme of truth, Austin's claims are expounded and explained as worthy of reassessment. Other chapters explore the ways in which Austin deals with sense, reference, 'family resemblances', truth-falsity assessments, and context-dependence. Austin's most famous statement of method, as outlining a 'linguistic phenomenology', is cast as analogous to Husserl's phenomenology in adopting an epoché which isolates language (rather than consciousness), a reading which helps to clarify several characteristic positions adopted by Austin. On metaphilosophical themes, Sbisà analyses the notion of ordinariness, distinguishing it from common sense and the endorsement of the 'Linguistic Turn', approaching it instead in terms of the by-default nature of the social bond and conversational cooperation. Various recurrent aspects of Austin's philosophy are illuminated: the opposition to dichotomies, the attention paid to intersubjectivity, the commitment to a 'sober' philosophy, and a strong sense of human situatedness.

The cognitive potency of the human mind can be fully appreciated only if it is conceived of as a linguistic mind.This is the starting point of Nikola Kompa's investigation into the relationship between language and cognition.

Underpinned by philosophical ideas from Plato to Ockham, and from Locke to Vygotsky, Kompa uses theories within the philosophy of language, mind, and cognitive science and draws on neuro-psychology and psycholinguistic studies to explore core ideas about language and cognition. How did language transform our ancestors into creatures of considerable cognitive and social accomplishment? How does language augment cognition? Is language only a means of communicating our ideas or is a means of thinking itself? Her study has repercussions for a broad range of questions, from how humans differ from other animals and what a cognitive architecture looks like if it approximates the achievements of the human mind, to questions of education and cross-cultural communication.

Theorizing and forming hypotheses about how language and cognition might have coevolved, how the availability of (symbolic) labels enhance various cognitive functions, what the cognitive function of inner speech might be and how inner speech and thought relate to each other, Kompa addresses the perennial philosophical question of what the benefits of having a language might be, and brings into sharper relief the intimate connection between linguistic and other cognitive functions. Informed by recent discussions on language evolution, labels, and inner speech, this timely contribution helps us understand more about how language changes the way we think.

In this book, McElvenny offers a concise history of modern linguistics from its emergence in the early nineteenth century up to the end of World War II. Written as a collective biography of the field, it concentrates on the interaction between the leading figures of linguistics, their controversies, and the role of the social and political context in shaping their ideas and methods.
While A History of Modern Linguistics focuses on disciplinary linguistics, the boundaries of the account are porous: developments in neighbouring fields - in particular, philosophy, psychology and anthropology - are brought into the discussion where they have contributed to linguistic research.

Jean-Yves Lacoste is one of the best known French philosophers alive today. Along with Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Michel Henry, Lacoste is hailed as a leading figure in the revival of French phenomenology in its engagement with Christian theology. In this highly readable and stylish translation by Oliver O'Donovan, Lacoste's In Search of Speech considers how linguistic events are precisely what enable us to escape the threat of nihilism and to survive in a world now cynically regarded as having entered a phase of 'post-truth.'

In recent decades, language has been reduced by various philosophers, both Anglo-American and European, in treatments that render it abstract, flat, or distant from life. In Search of Speechseeks to do justice to speech in the various ways in which we perform it and in which it confronts us as one or more events. Speech always occurs in the world: it makes things present to us or it makes them absent from us. Speaking, reading, and even being silent, are never wholly free from anxiety, babble, boredom, humour, and concern for others. Liturgical speech deserves particular attention, and even here speech is in danger; for speech can conceal as well as reveal. Lacoste begins with very weak assumptions and slowly, using many examples, and clarifying as he goes along, builds up a rich picture of human speech and the forces that seek to drain it of meaning.

When theorizing about language, we tend to assume that speakers are cooperative, honest, helpful, and so on. This, of course, isn't remotely true of a lot of real-world language use. Bad Language is the first textbook to explore non-idealized language use, the linguistic behaviour of those who exploit language for malign purposes. Two eminent philosophers of language present a lively and accessible introduction to a wide range of topics including lies and bullshit, slurs and insults, coercion and silencing: Cappelen and Dever offer theoretical frameworks for thinking about these all too common linguistic behaviours. As the text does not assume prior training in philosophy or linguistics, it is ideal for use as part of a philosophy of language course for philosophy students or for linguistics students.

Bad Language belongs to the series Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy of Language, in which each book introduces an important area of the philosophy of language, suitable for students at any level.

Winner, French Voices Grand Prize

Nostalgia makes claims on us both as individuals and as members of a political community. In this short book, Barbara Cassin provides an eloquent and sophisticated treatment of exile and of desire for a homeland, while showing how it has been possible for many to reimagine home in terms of language rather than territory.

Moving from Homer's and Virgil's foundational accounts of nostalgia to the exilic writings of Hannah Arendt, Cassin revisits the dangerous implications of nostalgia for land and homeland, thinking them anew through questions of exile and language.

Ultimately, Cassin shows how contemporary philosophy opens up the political stakes of rootedness and uprootedness, belonging and foreignness, helping us to reimagine our relations to others in a global and plurilingual world.