The Search For The Perfect Language
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The Search For The Perfect Language
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Author : Umberto Eco
language : en
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Release Date : 1997-04-08
The Search For The Perfect Language written by Umberto Eco and has been published by John Wiley & Sons this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1997-04-08 with History categories.
The idea that there once existed a language which perfectly and unambiguously expressed the essence of all possible things and concepts has occupied the minds of philosophers, theologians, mystics and others for at least two millennia. This is an investigation into the history of that idea and of its profound influence on European thought, culture and history. From the early Dark Ages to the Renaissance it was widely believed that the language spoken in the Garden of Eden was just such a language, and that all current languages were its decadent descendants from the catastrophe of the Fall and at Babel. The recovery of that language would, for theologians, express the nature of divinity, for cabbalists allow access to hidden knowledge and power, and for philosophers reveal the nature of truth. Versions of these ideas remained current in the Enlightenment, and have recently received fresh impetus in attempts to create a natural language for artificial intelligence. The story that Umberto Eco tells ranges widely from the writings of Augustine, Dante, Descartes and Rousseau, arcane treatises on cabbalism and magic, to the history of the study of language and its origins. He demonstrates the initimate relation between language and identity and describes, for example, how and why the Irish, English, Germans and Swedes - one of whom presented God talking in Swedish to Adam, who replied in Danish, while the serpent tempted Eve in French - have variously claimed their language as closest to the original. He also shows how the late eighteenth-century discovery of a proto-language (Indo-European) for the Aryan peoples was perverted to support notions of racial superiority. To this subtle exposition of a history of extraordinary complexity, Umberto Eco links the associated history of the manner in which the sounds of language and concepts have been written and symbolized. Lucidly and wittily written, the book is, in sum, a tour de force of scholarly detection and cultural interpretation, providing a series of original perspectives on two thousand years of European History. The paperback edition of this book is not available through Blackwell outside of North America.
The Search For The Perfect Language
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Author : Umberto Eco
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 1997
The Search For The Perfect Language written by Umberto Eco and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 1997 with Europe categories.
Lucidly and wittily written, this book is a tour de force of scholarly detection and cultural interpretation, providing a series of original perspectives on two thousand years of European history.
The Search For The Absolute
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Author : Jeffrey H. Williams
language : en
Publisher: Springer Nature
Release Date : 2022-06-01
The Search For The Absolute written by Jeffrey H. Williams and has been published by Springer Nature this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2022-06-01 with Technology & Engineering categories.
History and archaeology tell us that when our far ancestors began to settle in localized groups, they codified their lives and experiences, and formed a collective for mutual support. This proto-civilization would have arisen from each individual’s questions about the world, and their attempt to understand themselves and their place in the world. These groups, or tribes, evolved rules of conduct to facilitate communal living, and made a calendar for the group’s celebration of harvests, and other events upon which the group was utterly dependent. This process of social evolution is the origin of religion, and of a magical way of looking at Nature. Eventually, this developing worldview was also the origin of science, which is our investigation of Nature to understand something of what is happening around us, and to use this knowledge to ensure our survival in a violent, indifferent Universe. After all, science and religion seek to answer the same question: Why and how is the natural world the way it is? This book seeks to show how science evolved from religion and magic, in response to a need to understand Nature.
Quest
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Author : Wai H. Tsang
language : en
Publisher: Lulu.com
Release Date : 2016-04-04
Quest written by Wai H. Tsang and has been published by Lulu.com this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016-04-04 with Biography & Autobiography categories.
This book is about a 21st Century mythic adventure and spiritual odyssey. A real life Dan Brown novel where science meets reality, the mystical meets the mundane and the esoteric or hidden is made manifest. More mind bending than the Matrix movie and as strange as any Philip K. Dick take. This is a true story of one man's quest to understand the nature of Mind, Brain and Consciousness, during the course of which he discovers the nature of the universe and the divine. It is contemporary mythology involving the quest for the modern Holy Grail of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which would lead to the Holy Grail of the common understanding that is found at the heart of all the world religions, i.e. Gnosticism in Christianity, Kabbalah in Judaism, Sufism in Islam, Tantra and Advaita Vedanta in Hinduism, Vajrayana Buddhism and Taoism; also the secret behind Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, the Templars and the Ancient Mysteries of Greece of Egypt.
Babel
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Author : Samuel L. Boyd
language : en
Publisher: Fortress Press
Release Date : 2023-06-20
Babel written by Samuel L. Boyd and has been published by Fortress Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2023-06-20 with Religion categories.
In Babel: Political Rhetoric of a Confused Legacy, Samuel L. Boyd offers a new reading of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9. Using recent insights on the rhetoric of Neo-Assyrian politics and its ideology of governance as well as advances in biblical studies, Boyd shows how the Tower of Babel was not originally about a tower, Babylon, or the advent of multilingualism, at least in the earliest phases of the history and literary context of the story. Rather, the narrative was a critique against the Assyrian empire using themes of human overreach found in many places in Genesis 1-11. Boyd clarifies how idioms of Assyrian governance could have found their way into the biblical text, and how the Hebrew of Genesis 11:1-9 itself leads to a different translation of the passage than found in versions of the Bible, one that does not involve language. This new reading sheds light on how the story became about language. Boyd argues that this new understanding of Babel also illuminates aspects of the call of Abram when the Tower of Babel is interpreted as a story about something other than the origin of multilingualism. Finally, he frames the historical-critical research on the biblical passage and its reception in ancient Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sources with the uses of the Tower of Babel in modern politics of language and nationalism. He demonstrates how and why Genesis 11:1-9 has become so useful, in often detrimental ways, to the modern nation-state. Boyd explores this intellectual history of the passage into current events in the twenty-first century and offers perspectives on how a new reading of the Tower of Babel can speak to the current cultural and political moment and offer correctives on the uses and abuses of the Bible in the public sphere.
Software And Mind
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Author : Andrei Sorin
language : en
Publisher: Andsor Books
Release Date : 2013-01-01
Software And Mind written by Andrei Sorin and has been published by Andsor Books this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2013-01-01 with Science categories.
Addressing general readers as well as software practitioners, "Software and Mind" discusses the fallacies of the mechanistic ideology and the degradation of minds caused by these fallacies. Mechanism holds that every aspect of the world can be represented as a simple hierarchical structure of entities. But, while useful in fields like mathematics and manufacturing, this idea is generally worthless, because most aspects of the world are too complex to be reduced to simple hierarchical structures. Our software-related affairs, in particular, cannot be represented in this fashion. And yet, all programming theories and development systems, and all software applications, attempt to reduce real-world problems to neat hierarchical structures of data, operations, and features. Using Karl Popper's famous principles of demarcation between science and pseudoscience, the book shows that the mechanistic ideology has turned most of our software-related activities into pseudoscientific pursuits. Using mechanism as warrant, the software elites are promoting invalid, even fraudulent, software notions. They force us to depend on generic, inferior systems, instead of allowing us to develop software skills and to create our own systems. Software mechanism emulates the methods of manufacturing, and thereby restricts us to high levels of abstraction and simple, isolated structures. The benefits of software, however, can be attained only if we start with low-level elements and learn to create complex, interacting structures. Software, the book argues, is a non-mechanistic phenomenon. So it is akin to language, not to physical objects. Like language, it permits us to mirror the world in our minds and to communicate with it. Moreover, we increasingly depend on software in everything we do, in the same way that we depend on language. Thus, being restricted to mechanistic software is like thinking and communicating while being restricted to some ready-made sentences supplied by an elite. Ultimately, by impoverishing software, our elites are achieving what the totalitarian elite described by George Orwell in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" achieves by impoverishing language: they are degrading our minds.
Collected Writings Of Carmen Blacker
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Author : Carmen Blacker
language : en
Publisher: Routledge
Release Date : 2013-11-05
Collected Writings Of Carmen Blacker written by Carmen Blacker and has been published by Routledge this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2013-11-05 with Social Science categories.
This volume of the Collected Writings of Modern Western Scholars on Japan brings together the work of Carmen Blacker, who wrote extensively on religion, myth and folklore.
Limits Of Mathematical Modeling In The Social Sciences The The Significance Of Godel S Incompleteness Phenomenon
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Author : Francisco Antonio Doria
language : en
Publisher: World Scientific
Release Date : 2017-05-30
Limits Of Mathematical Modeling In The Social Sciences The The Significance Of Godel S Incompleteness Phenomenon written by Francisco Antonio Doria and has been published by World Scientific this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017-05-30 with Social Science categories.
Current mathematical models are notoriously unreliable in describing the time evolution of unexpected social phenomena, from financial crashes to revolution. Can such events be forecast? Can we compute probabilities about them? Can we model them? This book investigates and attempts to answer these questions through Gödel's two incompleteness theorems, and in doing so demonstrates how influential Gödel is in modern logical and mathematical thinking. Many mathematical models are applied to economics and social theory, while Gödel's theorems are able to predict their limitations for more accurate analysis and understanding of national and international events.This unique discussion is written for graduate level mathematicians applying their research to the social sciences, including economics, social studies and philosophy, and also for formal logicians and philosophers of science.
Definition In Theory And Practice
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Author : Roy Harris
language : en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date : 2007-05-24
Definition In Theory And Practice written by Roy Harris and has been published by Bloomsbury Publishing this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2007-05-24 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.
The problem of definition has a long history and has engaged the minds of some of the most eminent thinkers in the Western tradition, from Plato and Aristotle onwards. But it is also an everyday problem constantly confronting all who have to draft or interpret the countless texts on which modern society depends. Definition in Theory and Practice focuses on two areas where difficulties arise in a particularly acute form: lexicography and the law. Examining a wide range of approaches and definitional techniques, backed up by detailed analyses of dictionary entries and court cases, the authors provide a comprehensive survey of their subject. They argue that what underlies the problem of definition are conflicting assumptions about the way language functions. This in-depth study of definition will be of interest to academics researching lexicography, semantics and the intersection of linguistics and jurisprudence.
Antiquity And The Meanings Of Time
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Author : Duncan F. Kennedy
language : en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date : 2013-05-30
Antiquity And The Meanings Of Time written by Duncan F. Kennedy and has been published by Bloomsbury Publishing this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2013-05-30 with History categories.
Society and contemporary culture seem forever fascinated by the topic of time. In modern fiction, Ian McEwan (The Child in Time) and Martin Amis (Time's Arrow) have led the way in exploring the human condition in relation to past, present and future. In cinema, several cultural texts (Memento, Minority Report, The Hours) have similarly reflected a preoccupation with temporality and human experience. And in the sphere of politics, debates about the 'end of history', prompted by Francis Fukuyama, indicate that how we live is deeply determined by our relationship not only to place but also to the passing of time. But what did the ancients think about time? Is our interest in chronology a relatively recent phenomenon? Or does it go further back? In his major new work, Duncan Kennedy indicates that our own fascination with time-reckoning is by no means unique. Discussing a number of key texts (such as Homer's Odyssey; Sophocles' Oedipus Rex; Virgil's Aeneid; and Ovid's Metamophoses) and imaginatively setting these side-by-side with modern works (such as Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Joyce's Ulysses), he shows that, from era to era, and in different ways, human beings have uniformly striven to understand the unfolding of history and their relationship to it.