According to Robert Markley, historians and philosophers of science who link the rise of science to the rise of modern, objective forms of writing are interpreting the works of Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and their contemporaries far too narrowly. Focusing on the crises of representation in the discourse of physico-theology in English natural philosophy from 1660 to 1740, Markley demonstrates the crucial role played by theology in the development of modern science.
In the most comprehensive account to date of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language, Alexander Stern explores the nature of meaning by putting Benjamin in dialogue with Wittgenstein. Known largely for his essays on culture, aesthetics, and literature, Walter Benjamin also wrote on the philosophy of language. This early work is famously obscure and considered hopelessly mystical by some. But for Alexander Stern, it contains important insights and anticipates—in some respects surpasses—the later thought of a central figure in the philosophy of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein. As described in The Fall of Language, Benjamin argues that “language as such” is not a means for communicating an extra-linguistic reality but an all-encompassing medium of expression in which everything shares. Borrowing from Johann Georg Hamann’s understanding of God’s creation as communication to humankind, Benjamin writes that all things express meanings, and that human language does not impose meaning on the objective world but translates meanings already extant in it. He describes the transformations that language as such undergoes while making its way into human language as the “fall of language.” This is a fall from “names”—language that responds mimetically to reality—to signs that designate reality arbitrarily. While Benjamin’s approach initially seems alien to Wittgenstein’s, both reject a designative understanding of language; both are preoccupied with Russell’s paradox; and both try to treat what Wittgenstein calls “the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language.” Putting Wittgenstein’s work in dialogue with Benjamin’s sheds light on its historical provenance and on the turn in Wittgenstein’s thought. Although the two philosophies diverge in crucial ways, in their comparison Stern finds paths for understanding what language is and what it does.
Argues that pre-modern societies placed authority in the text of sacred books, and that when Europeans underwent the scientific revolution in the 17th century, the underlying assumptions and approaches did not alter, only the nature and location of the text where authority was to be sought. Also argues that the change was not generated by factors external to science such as the advent of the printing press or social changes, but by a continual negotiation by scientists themselves for meaning in which the narratives of the Book and the Word vied for authority. Also available in paper (14794-0) at $22.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Concentrating on both widely known and seldom-read texts from a variety of philosophers, writers, and critics—from Leibniz and Mendelssohn, through Kleist and Hebel, to Benjamin and Irigaray—the book analyzes the genesis and structure of interruption, a topic of growing interest to contemporary literary studies, continental philosophy, legal studies, and theological reflection.
That saving form of knowledge, as it develops in the lines of linguistic thought that extend from Bacon's Instauration to Wilkins's Philosophical Language, is both a product of and one potent agent in producing the emerging, scientistically designed, modern state.
The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland sparked off two linguistic events of enduring importance: it initiated the language shift from Irish to English, which constitutes the great drama of Irish cultural history, and it marked the beginnings of English linguistic expansion. The Elizabethan colonisers in Ireland included some of the leading poets and translators of the day. In Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland, Patricia Palmer uses their writings, as well as material from the State Papers, to explore the part that language played in shaping colonial ideology and English national identity. Palmer shows how manoeuvres of linguistic expansion rehearsed in Ireland shaped Englishmen's encounters with the languages of the New World, and frames that analysis within a comparison between English linguistic colonisation and Spanish practice in the New World. This is an ambitious, comparative study, which will interest literary and political historians.
If literature is to survive as literature, it must be freed from its subjugation to other disciplines, other concerns, and other projects. If Poe's fiction is to survive in any meaningful way, it must be liberated from the critical tradition that sees nothing in it but confirmation of its own theories.
How can untranslatability help us to think about the historical as well as the cultural and linguistic dimensions of translation? For the past two centuries, theoretical debates about translation have responded to the idea that translation overcomes linguistic and cultural incommensurability, while never inscribing full equivalence. More recently, untranslatability has been foregrounded in projects at the intersections between translation studies and other disciplines, notably philosophy and comparative literature. The critical turn to untranslatability re-emphasizes the importance of translation's negotiation with foreignness or difference and prompts further reflection on how that might be understood historically, philosophically, and ethically. If translation never replicates a source exactly, what does it mean to communicate some elements and not others? What or who determines what is translatable, or what can or cannot be recontextualized? What linguistic, political, cultural, or historical factors condition such determinations? Central to these questions is the way translation negotiates with, and inscribes asymmetries among, languages and cultures, operations that are inevitably ethical and political as well as linguistic. This book explores how approaching questions of translatability and untranslatability through premodern texts and languages can inform broader interdisciplinary conversations about translation as a concept and a practice. Working with case studies drawn from the francophone cultures of Flanders, England, and northern France, it explores how medieval texts challenge modern definitions of language, text, and translation and, in so doing, how such texts can open sites of variance and non-identity within what later became the hegemonic global languages we know today.
This critical investigation into Sabara's realism shows satyam as the real coincidence between reality and language. Sabara's statement: Sabda speaks, it makes known is the key to language. Language by its very nature neither objectifies nor subjectifies the status of reality. It presents through Sabda what it really is. Hermeneutics sustains this intrinsic function of language. It aims at overcoming the lack of understanding. This Indian approach asserts hermeneutics as experience in which man participates fully in rality and language as one whole. Genuine hermeneutics is thus the real response to what really is and that includes also the response to actual life.
