This book provides an invaluable historical document as well as the opportunity to listen once again to his incomparable, revelatory analyses of images through which he taught his students to see. Others can now follow the spellbinding lecturer as he works his way through an image, making us see what we had not, infecting
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings inspired contemporary philosophical thinking and advanced many issues that had been addressed by traditional philosophy. The questions raised by the Viennese philosopher initiated debates on a reconsideration of philosophical terminology. This is especially true for a term that has generated at least three significant controversies since its creation and will probably generate more disputes in the following years. It is the expression “form(s) of life” which translates into German as “Lebensform(en)” and “Form des Lebens”. The present volume contains contributions on forms of life, language games and the influence of Wittgenstein’s philosophy on other scholears.
This book deals with two fundamental issues in the semiotics of the image. The first is the relationship between image and observer: how does one look at an image? To answer this question, this book sets out to transpose the theory of enunciation formulated in linguistics over to the visual field. It also aims to clarify the gains made in contemporary visual semiotics relative to the semiology of Roland Barthes and Emile Benveniste. The second issue addressed is the relation between the forces, forms and materiality of the images. How do different physical mediums (pictorial, photographic and digital) influence visual forms? How does materiality affect the generativity of forms? On the forces within the images, the book addresses the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze and René Thom as well as the experiment of Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne. The theories discussed in the book are tested on a variety of corpora for analysis, including both paintings and photographs, taken from traditional as well as contemporary sources in a variety of social sectors (arts and sciences). Finally, semiotic methodology is contrasted with the computational analysis of large collections of images (Big Data), such as the “Media Visualization” analyses proposed by Lev Manovich and Cultural Analytics in the field of Computer Science to evaluate the impact of automatic analysis of visual forms on Digital Art History and more generally on the image sciences.
The Companion Exercise Forms for Teach Me Language makes the Teach Me Language manual more convenient to use because it provides all the manual's exercise forms in a larger, blank format. To help explain how the exercises in Teach Me Language are done, the book includes facsimiles of drill sheets, filled out with examples of how and who the exercises are done. The Companion Exercise Forms for Teach Me Language is a collection of the exercise sheets found the the Teach Me Language manual without the examples written on the forms. The exercise forms in this supplement are blank and enlarged for ease of use.
Metrics is often defined as a discipline that concerns itself with the study of meters. In this volume the term is used in a broader sense that more or less coincides with the traditional notion of versification . Understood this way, metrics is an eminently complex object that displays variation over time and in space, that concerns forms of a great variety and with different statuses (meters, rhymes, stanzas, prescribed forms, syllabification rules, nursery rhymes, slogans, musical textsetting, ablaut reduplication etc.), and that as a cultural manifestation is performed in a variety of ways (sung, chanted, spoken, read) that can have direct consequences on how it is structured. This profusion of forms is thought to correspond, at the level of perception, to a limited number of cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and to represent regularly iterating forms. This volume proposes a relatively coherent overall vision by distinguishing four main families of metrical forms, each clearly independent of the others and amenable to separate typologies."
Making sense of the world around us is a process involving both semiotic and material mediation--the use of signs and sign systems (preeminently language) and various kinds of tools (technics). As we use them, we experience them subjectively as extensions of our bodily selves and objectively as instruments for accessing the world with which we interact. Emphasizing this bipolar nature of language and technics, understood as intertwined "forms of sense," Robert Innis studies the multiple ways in which they are rooted in and transform human perceptual structures in both their individual and social dimensions. The book foregrounds and is organized around the notion of "semiotic embodiment." Language and technics are viewed as "probes" upon which we rely, in which we are embodied, and that themselves embody and structure our primary modes of encountering the world. While making an important substantive contribution to present debates about the "biasing" of perception by language and technics, Innis also seeks to provide a methodological model of how complementary analytical resources from American pragmatist and various European traditions can be deployed fruitfully in the pursuit of new insights into the phenomenon of meaning-making.
This book takes an idea first explored by medieval logicians 800 years ago and revisits it armed with the tools of contemporary linguistics, logic, and computer science. The idea - the Holy Grail of the medieval logicians - was the thought that all of logic could be reduced to two very simple rules that are sensitive to logical polarity (for example, the presence and absence of negations). Ludlow and Živanović pursue this idea and show how it has profound consequences for our understanding of the nature of human inferential capacities. They also show its consequences for some of the deepest issues in contemporary linguistics, including the nature of quantification, puzzles about discourse anaphora and pragmatics, and even insights into the source of aboutness in natural language. The key to their enterprise is a formal relation they call "p-scope" - a polarity-sensitive relation that controls the operations that can be carried out in their Dynamic Deductive System. They show that with p-scope in play, deductions can be carried out using sublogical operations like those they call COPY and PRUNE - operations that are simple syntactic operations on sentences. They prove that the resulting deductive system is complete and sound. The result is a beautiful formal tapestry in which p-scope unlocks important properties of natural language, including the property of "restrictedness," which they prove to be equivalent to the semantic notion of conservativity. More than that, they show that restrictedness is also a key to understanding quantification and discourse anaphora, and many other linguistic phenomena.
This study uses constructivist language theory based on Lann Hornscheidt’s research as a framework. Grammar is viewed as a form of language use being more or less conventionalized. So, the debate on feminist linguistics is viewed from a new perspective. The study begins with an introduction summarizing the state of research and establishing the research questions. Ch. 2 presents the constructivist framework: The notion of extra-linguistic reality is abandoned and also the idea of language as reflection of reality. The strict distinction between a preliminary language system and language use no longer exists. Ch. 3 provides an overview of German feminist linguistics with a critical perspective on its early discussions. Ch. 4 gives a historical overview on grammar theoretical views on gender. Ch. 5 deals with more recent approaches including diachronic approaches to the question of grammatical gender. The critical evaluation shows that feminist linguistics is now part of different fields of study, even if grammar theorists often do not recognize the results of feminist linguistics. In Ch. 6 a corpus-assisted study of so-called genderfair forms in German is presented and the methodology is explained. In Ch. 7 results are summarized and presented with a particular focus on the usage of genderfair forms with non-human referents. Conclusions from the findings and a general outlook are presented in Ch. 8.
A COMPANION TO WITTGENSTEIN The most comprehensive survey of Wittgenstein’s thought yet compiled, this volume of fifty newly commissioned essays by leading interpreters of his philosophy is a keynote addition to the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series. Full of penetrating insights into the life and work of the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, the collection explores the full range of Wittgenstein’s contribution to philosophy. It includes essays on his intellectual development, his work in logic and mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and action, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of religion, and much else. As well as examining Wittgenstein’s contribution to human understanding in detail, the Companion features vital contextual analysis that traces the relationship between his ideas and those of other philosophers and schools of thought, including the Aristotelian and continental philosophical traditions. Authors also address prominent themes that remain current in today’s philosophical debates, explaining Wittgenstein’s continuing legacy alongside his historical significance. Essential reading for scholars of philosophy at all levels, A Companion to Wittgenstein combines engaging commentary with unrivaled academic authority.