Introduction

Author(s):  
Timothy Raylor

The Introduction traces the history of modern scholarship on Hobbes’s understanding of rhetoric and its relationship to the development and articulation of his philosophy, arguing that this has been misconstrued. The received view that Hobbes began as a Ciceronian humanist who rejected an early confidence in the value of rhetoric on turning to science around 1640, only to re-embrace it as a necessary part of civil philosophy in Leviathan is called into question by scrutiny of some of the key passages commonly adduced in its support. Hobbes’s critique of that humanist mantra, the association of ratio and oratio (an association unstable even in its classical source) represents not a narrow attack on oratory, but a broad concern about the character of human language. Second, Hobbes’s apparent insistence, at the close of Leviathan, on the need for reason to be backed by eloquence involves a misreading of that much cited passage.

Author(s):  
Kira Ilina

Introduction. The article is focused on reconstruction of the practices of forming a disciplinary group of classical philologists in the Russian Empire universities in the 1830s – 1850s. Methods. For this purpose, the archival materials of the Ministry of Education, as well as Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan and Kiev Universities are considered. The research methodology is based on a combination of both traditional general historical methods and methods of classical source studies, and approaches developed in the framework of the history of science, the sociology of knowledge and the history of disciplines. Analysis and results. It is important to analyze three points: the political context, practices in building career trajectories and academic networks of professors of Greek and Roman literature and antiquities at Russian universities. The transformation of the existing network of universities into the system of public education was carried out by the Minister of Public Education Sergey Uvarov in the 1830s. Transferring to Russia the European model of secondary education based on the study of classical languages, Uvarov created a system of general education and relentlessly promoted antiquity studies in the Russian Empire. Teaching classical disciplines was expanded at gymnasiums and universities. Following the academic personnel reform of the late 1830s, a number of “antiquity chairs” at universities was headed by young philologists and historians who had spent two or three years of training at universities in Germany, mainly in Berlin, attending lectures and seminars of leading German classical philologists. In the 1840s – 1850s, an artificially constructed group of classical philologists gradually transformed into a disciplinary community.


2020 ◽  
pp. 20-25
Author(s):  
Albina Fedorovna Myshkina ◽  
Inessa Vladimirovna Iadranskaia

The article is devoted to identifying the role of the «Dictionary of the Chuvash language» by N.I. Ashmarin in revealing the mental foundations of modern Chuvash and in determining the sociocultural and psychological type of character of the Chuvash. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that during the period of globalization and universalization of cultures, the return to the original values of the nation, the search for individual-folk traits of a person's character in his worldview and lifestyle, which is most clearly recorded in his language, is of great importance. The human language retains a large amount of information that contributes to its spiritual, scientific, technical and industrial development. Therefore, the analysis of vocabulary also contributes to the study of the history of the development of man, people, nation, humanity. The purpose of the research is to study the socio-historical, cultural and ethical information enshrined in the vocabulary of the people and recorded in this dictionary. The principles of methodology, that reflect elements of conceptology, hermeneutics and general philology are used in the study. It is concluded that the Chuvash language (more broadly, the Chuvash culture) is an integral part of the ancient Turkic world, therefore research in this direction expands the framework of understanding the philosophy, history, theology and everyday life of the Chuvash people.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 149-165
Author(s):  
Franck Robert ◽  

Le commentaire que propose Merleau-Ponty de L’origine de la géométrie de Husserl en 1960 accorde une place privilégiée au langage, à l’écrit : l’étonnement peut être grand de voir Merleau-Ponty, dans la continuité de Husserl, penser la genèse de l’idéalité géométrique à partir d’une méditation sur la littérature. La réflexion de Merleau-Ponty sur la littérature a pris un tour ontologique décisif au début des années cinquante, dans le long commentaire de Proust notamment en 1953-1954. C’est dans cet esprit que le cours de 1960 accorde à la littérature un sens ontologique : l’idéalité géométrique ne peut advenir comme idéalité que par passage à la parole et à l’écrit, mais le sens même de l’idéalité scientifique ne peut se comprendre que si on la replace sur fond d’idéalités plus fondamentales que la littérature précisément dévoile, idéalités qui se nouent à travers le temps, dans le lien entre le passé et le présent, moi et l’autre. La littérature éclaire l’histoire de la géométrie d’une autre manière encore : elle met au jour l’entrelacement homme-langage-monde, condition d’émergence d’un sens vrai, qui advient dans l’histoire de la géométrie, et que la littérature, assumant notre être de parole, porte plus fondamentalement encore.The commentary Merleau-Ponty offers in 1960 on Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry gives a privileged place to language, to writing: it is perhaps a great astonishment to see Merleau-Ponty, in continuity with Husserl, thinking about the genesis of geometrical ideality beginning from a meditation on literature. Merleau-Ponty’s reflection on literature took a decisive ontological turn at the beginning of the 1950s, notably in the long commentary on Proust in 1953-1954. It is in this spirit that the course of 1960 grants to literature an ontological sense: the ideality of geometry can occur as ideality by the passage to speech and to writing, but the meaning of even scientific ideality can be understood only if one places it on the basis of more fundamental idealities that literature precisely reveals, idealities that are linked across time, in the connection between past and present, self and other. Literature clarifies the history of geometry in yet another manner: it brings to light the intertwining of human-language-world, condition of the emergence of a true sense, which occurs in the history of geometry, and which literature, assuming our being in speech bears more fundamentally still.Il commento de L’origine della geometria di Husserl proposto da Merleau-Ponty nel 1960 accorda un posto privilegiato al linguaggio, alla scrittura. Ci si potrebbe stupire del fatto che Merleau-Ponty, nel solco di Husserl, pensi l’idealità geometrica a partire da una riflessione sulla letteratura. Il pensiero di Merleau-Ponty sulla letteratura ha assunto un’inflessione ontologica decisiva all’inizio degli anni Cinquanta, in particolare nel lungo commento a Proust del 1953-1954. È proprio prolungando questa linea che il corso del 1960 attribuisce alla letteratura un senso ontologico: l’idealità geometrica diviene idealità proprio nel passaggio dalla parola allo scritto, ma il senso stesso dell’idealità scientifica può essere compreso solo se ricollochiamo quest’ultima su quello sfondo di idealità più fondamentali che la letteratura ci rivela, idealità che si instaurano attraverso il tempo, nel legame tra il passato e il presente, l’io e l’altro. Infine, è in un altro modo ancora che la letteratura illumina la storia della geometria: essa ci consente di illuminare l’intreccio uomo-linguaggio-mondo, condizione di emergenza di un senso vero, che si attesta nella storia della geometria e che la letteratura, in quanto essa assume il nostro essere già da sempre implicati con la parola, reca con sé in modo ancora più fondamentale.


2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefania Tutino

AbstractThis article examines certain aspects of the history of the doctrines of equivocation and mental reservation in early modern Catholic elaborations. It argues that the first Catholic theologians who engaged systematically with these doctrines, Domingo de Soto and Martin de Azpilcueta (Navarrus), used them as tools to investigate the potentialities and limitations of human language as a means to communicate meaning between a speaker and a listener. This article also shows that between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries Catholic theologians, both Jesuit and non-Jesuit, changed the debate over these doctrines into a debate over the moral quality of the speaker's intention. By analyzing the developments of the Catholic debate over equivocation and mental reservation, this article seeks to offer a fresh interpretation of the links between theology, morality, and hermeneutics.


2014 ◽  
Vol 281 (1792) ◽  
pp. 20141370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arik Kershenbaum ◽  
Ann E. Bowles ◽  
Todd M. Freeberg ◽  
Dezhe Z. Jin ◽  
Adriano R. Lameira ◽  
...  

Many animals produce vocal sequences that appear complex. Most researchers assume that these sequences are well characterized as Markov chains (i.e. that the probability of a particular vocal element can be calculated from the history of only a finite number of preceding elements). However, this assumption has never been explicitly tested. Furthermore, it is unclear how language could evolve in a single step from a Markovian origin, as is frequently assumed, as no intermediate forms have been found between animal communication and human language. Here, we assess whether animal taxa produce vocal sequences that are better described by Markov chains, or by non-Markovian dynamics such as the ‘renewal process’ (RP), characterized by a strong tendency to repeat elements. We examined vocal sequences of seven taxa: Bengalese finches Lonchura striata domestica , Carolina chickadees Poecile carolinensis , free-tailed bats Tadarida brasiliensis , rock hyraxes Procavia capensis , pilot whales Globicephala macrorhynchus , killer whales Orcinus orca and orangutans Pongo spp . The vocal systems of most of these species are more consistent with a non-Markovian RP than with the Markovian models traditionally assumed. Our data suggest that non-Markovian vocal sequences may be more common than Markov sequences, which must be taken into account when evaluating alternative hypotheses for the evolution of signalling complexity, and perhaps human language origins.


Diacronia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentin Dragoș Biro

Language is subjected to a double definition process: by the static reality characteristic of the system, due to inertia to change, and by its permanent character regarding the language acts producing, through speaking. Because it is under the pressure of concrete communicative needs, a language is subjected to a continuous dynamics assuring the language progress or regress, both aspects, together with neutral modifications, actually meaning, in the Darwinist perspective, the language evolution. The article, thus, comes with a necessary conceptual delimitation between the language evolution and progress, on the one hand, but also between causes which determine the evolution and the evolution in itself, as a process. Linguistics has faced radically different approaches on its topic of study, natural human language; the perspectives on language differ from the relationships network which make the elements creating one language or another to get the quality of systems, to a product of man’s will and freedom, because the language cannot be separated from the speakers’ freedom, or to the attention paid to meanings, these being always socially constituted, based on the interactions between a community members. In such a diversity where divergence dominates convergence, this article intends, in subsidiary, to fix, from an diachronic perspective, the definition of linguistics as being, in fact, the history of evolutions the language has met since its beginnings.


ANALES RANM ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 135 (135(02)) ◽  
pp. 9-21
Author(s):  
José E. García-Albea

I will introduce the topic of this paper by demarcating the notion of “language”, as a necessary first step in order to know what we mean when dealing with its appearance and development in the human species. In a first approximation, I’ll highlight the fact of being a human capacity with an intermediary function between a physical signal (i.e., sounds) and an intentional state of the individual (i.e., meanings). Such an intermediary function and its associated features (arbitrariness, symbolism, compositionality, productivity, systematicity) require a multidisciplinary treatment with different levels of explanation (linguistic, psychological, neurobiological) that give rise to corresponding models of that human language capacity. I’ll then review those models and make them converge into the appropriate frame of reference –characteristic of the cognitive science– for dealing with the main topic of this paper. It will be pursued along two sections, one devoted to the acquisition of language by the individual and its development from an ontogenetic perspective; and the other just devoted to language appearance in the evolutionary history of the species and, hence, to its phylogenetic development. I’ll conclude by underlining the natural (innate for its most part) and specialized character of the human faculty of language, together with its specificity as a unique property of the human species, which points to its relatively sudden appearance and to the possibility of facing a genuine example of evolutionary discontinuity.


MELINTAS ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Yulius Eko Priyambodo

Human forgets, but at the same time longs for one of the basic hopes that might disclose the web of meanings within the world of human existence. One might start asking about one’s fundamental reasons to exist, and one of them is to use language. Still, language is understood and used in multifaceted ways. In these miscellaneous interpretations of language, one that is quite seldom to explore is human language to express humour. Humour entails laugh and joy, and these bring forth nothing less than happiness that seem to have been eternally carved in the history of humankind. Reflecting on this aspect of language, this article wants to explore the human as <em>homo ridens</em>, a laughing being, which foreseeably brings forward his/her dimensions as a playful being, a social being, and a spiritual being. The author tries to show the relevance of a laughing human with the struggle of every individual to be a more authentic, social, and faithful person.


Author(s):  
Chris Cooper

‘A history of blood’ considers why the colour red and blood hold such pre-eminence in human language and culture. Views about what function blood actually performed in the body have varied widely through history. The studies of 2nd-century physician Galen are described along with procedures such as bloodletting, used in medicine for a long time. The structure of the vessels that contain blood in the body—arteries and veins—has always intrigued scholars. The 13th-century Islamic physician Ibn al-Nafis was the first to propose a circulatory system, but it was in 1628, when William Harvey, physician to King James I, published his findings, that the true circulatory system was explained.


CounterText ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 332-351
Author(s):  
Inge Arteel

In this article I focus on a selection of radio plays by the Austrian author Gerhard Rühm and analyse them from the perspective of life writing, starting with Irene Kacandes' findings on the increased referential effect of experimental life writing (2012). I want to extend the notion of experimental life writing to the medium of the experimental radio play and investigate whether and how the experiments with spoken language, voice, and musicalisation of language contribute to an effect of realness and create an aural world infused with lived experientiality. I'm particularly interested in the relationship between individualised, figurative voices and sounds, as they are to be expected in (auto)biographical art, and the defiguration and deindividualisation in the experimental, synthetic manipulation of human language and voice. Situating the corpus in the history of the German Neues Hörspiel, my analysis hopes to prove that the reality effect of the experimental (auto)biographical radio play does not, or at least not only, refer to an individual biographical self. Instead, the complex constellation of text and paratext, of scripted and spoken language, and of voice and music opens up the referential level for a broader, more general human experientiality. Most importantly, the technical possibilities of the radiophonic medium allow an intricate play with the semantics of referential language, with masking and unmasking voices, and with the exploration of the pathos of speaking together.


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