[PDF] Investigations Into The Origin Of Language And Consciousness eBook

Author : Trân Duc Thao
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 47,85 MB
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9400962363

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Tran Duc Thao, a wise and learned scientist and an eminent Marxist philoso pher, begins this treatise on the origins of language and consciousness with a question: "One of the principal difficulties of the problem of the origin of consciousness is the exact determination of its beginnings. Precisely where must one draw the line between the sensori-motor psychism of animals and the conscious psychism that we see developing in man?" And then he cites Karl Marx's famous passage about 'the bee and the architect' from Capital: ... what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in the imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. (Capital, Vol. I, p. 178, tr. Moore and Aveling) Thao follows this immediately with a second question: "But is this the most elementary form of consciousness?" Thus the conundrum concerning the origins of consciousness is posed as a circle: if human consciousness pre supposes representation (of the external reality, of mental awareness, of actions, of what it may), and if this consciousness emerges first with the activity of production using tools, and if the production of tools itself pre supposes representation - that is, with an image of what is to be produced in the mind of the producer - then the conditions for the origins of human

Author : Đức Thảo Trần
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 286 pages
File Size : 26,69 MB
Release : 1986
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9789027707376

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Tran Duc Thao, a brilliant student of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Super- ieure within the post-1935 decade of political disaster, born in Vietnam shortly after the F ir st World War, recipient of a scholarship in Paris in 1935 37, was early noted for his independent and originaI mind_ While the 1930s twisted down to the defeat of the Spanish Republic, the compromise with German Fascism at Munich, and the start of the Second World War, and while the 1940s began with hypocritical stability at the Western Front fol- lowed by the defeat of France, and the occupation of Paris by the German power together with French collaborators, and the n ended with liberation and a search for a new understanding of human situations, the young Thao was deeply immersed in the classical works of European philosophy. He was al so the attentive but critical student of a quite special generation of French metaphysicians and social philosophers: Gaston Berger, Maurice Merleau- Ponty, Emile Brehier, Henri Lefebvre, Rene le Senne, Jean-Paul Sartre, perhaps the young Louis Althusser. They, in their several modes of response, had been meditating for more than a decade on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, which came to France in the thirties as a new metaphysical enlighten- ment - phenomenology.

Author : Julian Jaynes
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 580 pages
File Size : 20,56 MB
Release : 2000-08-15
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 0547527543

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National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

Author : Joan Casser
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 12,83 MB
Release : 2022-11-14
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9004520783

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This annotated commentary delineating Michel Pêcheux’s materialist discourse theory anticipates the formation of a real social science to supersede the metaphysical meanings ‘always-already-there’ instituted by empirical ideology. Structures of Language presents Pêcheux’s consequential work in respect of Ferdinand de Saussure’s epistemological breakthrough that founded the science of linguistics: the theoretical separation of sound from meaning. Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar, John Searle’s philosophy of language, B. F. Skinner’s indwelling agents, J. L. Austin’s speech situations, Jacques Lacan’s symbolic order, and other influential linguistic researchers, are cited to explain imaginary semantic systems. The broader implications for structural metaphysics in language use are tacitly conveyed.

Author : P. Nicolacopoulos
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 438 pages
File Size : 39,15 MB
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Science
ISBN : 9400920156

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Our Greek colleagues, in Greece and abroad, must know (indeed they do know) how pleasant it is to recognize the renaissance of the philosophy of science among them with this fine collection. Classical and modern, technical and humane, historical and logical, admirably original and respectfully traditional, these essays will deserve close study by philosophical readers throughout the world. Classical scholars and historians of science likewise will be stimulated, and the historians of ancient as well as modern philosophers too. Reviewers might note one or more of the contributions as of special interest, or as subject to critical wrestling (that ancient tribute); we will simply congratulate Pantelis Nicolacopoulos for assembling the essays and presenting the book, and we thank the contributors for their works and for their happy agreement to let their writings appear in this book. R. S. C. xi INTRODUCTORY REMARKS Neither philosophy nor science is new to Greece, but philosophy of science is. There are broader (socio-historical) and more specific (academic) reasons that explain, to a satisfactory degree, both the under-development of philosophy and history of science in Greece until recently and its recent development to international standards. It is, perhaps, not easy to have in mind the fact that the modem Greek State is only 160 years old (during quite a period of which it was consider ably smaller than it is today, its present territory having been settled after World War II).

Author : Fan Dainian
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 506 pages
File Size : 39,26 MB
Release : 2013-03-09
Category : Science
ISBN : 9401587175

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The articles in this collection were all selected from the first five volumes of the Journal of Dialectics of Nature published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences between 1979 and 1985. The Journal was established in 1979 as a comprehensive theoretical publication concerning the history, philosophy and sociology of the natural sciences. It began publication as a response to China's reform, particularly the policy of opening to the outside world. Chinese scholars began to undertake distinctive, original research in these fields. This collection provides a cross-section of their efforts during the initial phase. To enable western scholars to understand the historical process of this change in Chinese academics, Yu Guangyuan's `On the Emancipation of the Mind' and Xu Liangying's `Essay on the Role of Science and Democracy in Society' have been included in this collection. Three of the papers included on the philosophy of science are discussions of philosophical issues in cosmology and biology by scientists themselves. The remaining four are written by philosophers of science and discuss information and cognition, homeostasis and Chinese traditional medicine, the I Ching (Yi Jing) and mathematics, etc. Papers have been selected on the history of both classical and modern science and technology, the most distinctive of which are macro-comparisons of the development of science in China and the west. Some papers discuss the issue of the demarcation of periods in the history of science, the history of ancient Chinese mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy, machinery, medicine, etc. Others discuss the history of modern physics and biology, the history of historiography of science in China and the history of regional development of Chinese science and technology. Also included are biographies of three post-eighteenth-century Chinese scholars, Li Shanlan (1811-1882), Hua Hengfang (1833–1902), and Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), who contributed greatly to the introduction of western science and scholarship to China. In addition, three short papers have been included introducing the interactions between Chinese scholars and three great western scientists, Niels Bohr, Norbert Wiener, and Robert A. Millikan.

Author : Sverker Johansson
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Page : 358 pages
File Size : 38,17 MB
Release : 2005-01-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9027238936

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Sverker Johansson has written an unusual book on language origins, with its emphasis on empirical evidence rather than theory-building. This is a book for the student or researcher who prefers solid data and well-supported conclusions, over speculative scenarios. Much that has been written on the origins of language is characterized by hypothesizing largely unconstrained by evidence. But empirical data do exist, and the purpose of this book is to integrate and review the available evidence from all relevant disciplines, not only linguistics but also, e.g., neurology, primatology, paleoanthropology, and evolutionary biology. The evidence is then used to constrain the multitude of scenarios for language origins, demonstrating that many popular hypotheses are untenable. Among the issues covered: (1) Human evolutionary history, (2) Anatomical prerequisites for language, (3) Animal communication and ape "language", (4) Mind and language, (5) The role of gesture, (6) Innateness, (7) Selective advantage of language, (8) Proto-language.