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Natural language and possible minds : how language uncovers the cognitive landscape of nature /
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In Natural Language and Possible Minds: How Language Uncovers the Cognitive Landscape of Nature Prakash Mondal attempts to demonstrate that language can reveal the hidden logical texture of diverse types of mentality in non-humans, contrary to popular belief. The widely held assumption in mainstream cognitive science is that language being humanly unique introduces an anthropomorphic bias in investigations into the nature of other possible minds. This book turns this around by formulating a lattice of mental structures distilled from linguistic structures constituting the cognitive building blocks of an ensemble of biological entities/beings. This turns out to have surprising consequences for machine cognition as well. Challenging mainstream views, this book will appeal to cognitive scientists, philosophers of mind, linguists and also cognitive ethologists.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004344204 :
0929-8436 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The alphabet of nature /
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F. M van Helmont's Alphabet of Nature was one of many books published about language in the early modern period. The "language debate," as it has come to be called, was a topic of compelling interest to major figures such as Reuchlin, Rabelais, Paracelsus, Agrippa, Postel, Boehme, Kircher, Hobbes, Descartes, Comenius, Spinoza, Locke, Boyle, Newton, and Leibniz. At issue were profound questions about whether language is natural or artificial, ordained by God or created by man. The answers given entailed a web of consequences that could lead to arrest, imprisonment, even execution. It is therefore not surprising that van Helmont wrote his book while imprisoned in the dungeons of the Roman Inquisition.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [205]-208) and index. :
9789047419983 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Aztec Religion and Art of Writing : Investigating Embodied Meaning, Indigenous Semiotics, and the Nahua Sense of Reality /
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In her groundbreaking investigation from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion, Isabel Laack explores the religion and art of writing of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs of Mexico. Inspired by postcolonial approaches, she reveals Eurocentric biases in academic representations of Aztec cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, ritual, aesthetics, and the writing system to provide a powerful interpretation of the Nahua sense of reality. Laack transcends the concept of "sacred scripture" traditionally employed in religions studies in order to reconstruct the Indigenous semiotic theory and to reveal how Aztec pictography can express complex aspects of embodied meaning. Her study offers an innovative approach to nonphonographic semiotic systems, as created in many world cultures, and expands our understanding of human recorded visual communication. This book will be essential reading for scholars and readers interested in the history of religions, Mesoamerican studies, and the ancient civilizations of the Americas. 'This excellent book, written with intellectual courage and critical self-awareness, is a brilliant, multilayered thought experiment into the images and stories that made up the Nahua sense of reality as woven into their sensational ritual performances and colorful symbolic writing system.' - Davíd Carrasco, Harvard University
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004392014 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
First Nature. The Problem of Nature in the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty /
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This book explores a radically integrative phenomenology of nature through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By revisiting novel empirical findings in the sciences and advances in scientific methods and concepts, Merleau-Ponty leads us to rediscover a first nature right at the heart of the subject. Alessio Rotundo traces and documents the presence of a double meaning of nature affecting Merleau-Ponty's analyses across foundational aspects of human experience: sense perception, organic development and behavior, cognition, language, and history. Physical, biological, and psychological processes in nature are not merely scientific data; they provide the evidence for another, more primordial sense of nature.
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1 online resource (258 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004548947
The Question of Methodological Naturalism.
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The traditions and institutions that we call religions abound with references to the supernatural: ancestral spirits, karma, the afterlife, miracles, revelation, deities, et cetera How are students of religion to approach the behaviors, doctrines, and beliefs that refer to such phenomena, which by their very nature are supposed to defy the methods of empirical research and the theories of historical scholarship? That is the question of methodological naturalism. The Question of Methodological Naturalism offers ten thoughtful engagements with that perennial question for the academic study of religion. Contributors include established senior scholars and newer voices propounding a range of perspectives, resulting in both surprising points of convergence and irreconcilable differences in how our shared discipline should be conceptualized and practiced.
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1 online resource. :
9789004372436
Knowledge, language, and silence : selected papers /
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Izydora Dąmbska (1904-1982) was a Polish philosopher; a student of Kazimierz Twardowski, and his last assistant. Her output consists of almost 300 publications. The main domains of her research were semiotics, epistemology and broadly understood methodology as well as axiology and history of philosophy. Dąmbska's approach to philosophical problems reflected tendencies that were characteristic of the Lvov-Warsaw School. She applied high methodological standards but has never limited the domain of analyzed problems in advance. The present volume includes twenty-eight translations of her representative papers. As one of her pupils rightly wrote: "Dąmbska's works may help everyone [...] to think clearly. Her attitude of an unshaken philosopher may help anyone to hold oneself straight, and, if necessary, to get up after a fall".
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004312678 :
1389-6768 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Physics and philosophy of nature in Greek Neoplatonism : proceedings of the European Science...
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Traditional scholarship has generally neglected the philosophy of nature in Greek Neoplatonism. In the last few decades, however, this attitude has changed radically. Natural philosophy has increasingly been regarded as a crucial aspect of late antique thought. Furthermore, several studies have outlined the impressive historical legacy of Neoplatonic physics. Building on this new interest, the ten papers published here concentrate on Neoplatonic philosophy of nature from Plotinus to Simplicius, and on its main conceptual features and its relation to the previous philosophical and scientific traditions. The papers were presented at a conference sponsored by the European Science Foundation in Castelvecchio Pascoli in June 2006. This volume makes an important contribution to the understanding of Greek Neoplatonism and its historical significance.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [283]-296) and indexes. :
9789047427261 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The Language of Digital Education : An Expanded Glossary of Key Terms and Concepts /
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This book presents concise definitions and illustrative contexts for many approaches, ideas, and paradigms related to digital education. Unlike existing glossaries that often focus solely on technical terminology, this resource uniquely integrates pedagogical, technological, and socio-cultural perspectives. It not only defines terms but also critically examines their implications for teaching and learning, providing a more holistic understanding of digital education. Contributors are: Isabel Balteiro, Miguel Ángel Campos-Pardillos, Ka Long Roy Chan, Salvatore Ciancitto, Liubov Darzhinova, Derya Duran, Georgios Ellinas, Stella Hadjistassou, Pascal Hohaus, Teppo Jakonen, Marjut Johansson, Merve Kıymaz, Ioannis Lefkos, Ruslana Margova, Claudia Mustroph, Maarit Mutta, Svitlana Nasakina, Liisa Peura, Alessandro Puglisi, Violeta Stojičić, Ralia Thoma, Outi Veivo, Johanathan Woodworth and Siyang Zhou.
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1 online resource (223 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004719118
Generative Grammar's Grave Foundational Errors /
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This work critically examines Noam Chomsky's widely accepted ontological assumptions-now referred to as "biolinguistics"-and demonstrates that they are internally inconsistent. Notably, Chomsky himself has, at least once, acknowledged this issue. Additionally, we challenge a fundamental claim from Chomsky's linguistic theories of the 1950s: that natural languages, particularly English, operate on constructive (proof-theoretic) grammars, also known as generative grammars. This assertion fails to account for numerous linguistic structures that fall outside its framework. Finally, we scrutinize Chomsky's frequent assertion that "there is essentially only one language on Earth," revealing it to be more rhetorical than substantive. By exposing these foundational flaws, this work calls for a reassessment of key aspects of Chomskyan linguistics.
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1 online resource (176 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004730922
The Alphabetisation of Thought : Orthography, Locke, and Natural Philosophy /
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The Alphabetisation of Thought is a bold and original study about the rise, spread and dominance of orthographic thinking in the Early Modern period. Starting out as a local, grammatical mode of thinking, it soon gained momentum, strength and depth, turning into a development that provoked a wholesale reorganisation of thought along the lines of alphabetical writing. The study brings together an unprecedented range of texts from areas as diverse as grammar, epistemology, classical scholarship, natural philosophy and cryptography. A major source of evidence is Locke's doctrine of ideas as laid out in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding . Echoing the orthographic debate of the preceding 150 years, it affords not only crucial insight into the final stages of the alphabetisation process, but also glimpses of its legacy.
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1 online resource (416 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004684850
Women, Gender and Language in Morocco /
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This volume deals with the complex but poorly understood relationship between women, gender, and language in Morocco, a Muslim, multilingual, multicultural, and developing country. The hypothesis on which the book is based is that an understanding of gender perception and women's agency can be achieved only by taking into account the structure of power in a specific culture and that language is an important component of this power. In Moroccan culture, history, geography, Islam, orality, multilingualism, social organization, economic status, and political system constitute the superstructures of power within which factors such as social differences, contextual differences, and identity differences interact in the daily linguistic performances of gender. Moroccan women are far from constituting a homogeneous group, consequently the choices available to them vary in nature and empowering capacity, thus 'widening' the spectrum of gender beyond cultural limits.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789047404378
9789004128538
The Animal Names of the Arab Ancestors : Explaining the Non-human Names of Arab Kinship Groups, Volume 2-2 Appendices /
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In the Arab world, people belong to kinship groups (lineages and tribes). Many lineages are named after animals, birds, and plants. Why? This survey evaluates five old explanations - "totemism," "emulation of predatory animals," "ancestor eponymy," "nicknaming," and "Bedouin proximity to nature." It suggests a new hypothesis: Bedouin tribes use animal names to obscure their internal cleavages. Such tribes wax and wane as they attract and lose allies and clients; they include "attached" elements as well as actual kin. To prevent outsiders from spotting "attached" groups, Bedouin tribes scatter non-human names across their segments, making it difficult to link any segment with a human ancestor. Young's argument contributes to theories of tribal organization, Arab identity, onomastics, and Near Eastern kinship.
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1 online resource (450 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004697485