Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

WHAT KIND OF CREATURES ARE WE?

Noam Chomsky

WHAT KIND OF CREATURES ARE WE? contains four lectures Chomsky gave at Columbia University (three of which were the John Dewey lectures) and which were published in the Journal of Philosophy.

Addressing the most fundamental themes defining our humanity: the uniquely human capacity for language, the nature and limits of the human mind, and the possibilities for the common good in human society and politics.

Noam Chomsky is widely known and deeply admired for being the founder of modern linguistics, one of the founders of the field of cognitive science, and perhaps the most avidly read political theorist and commentator of our time. In these lectures,he presents a lifetime of philosophical reflection on all three of these areas of research to which he has contributed for over half a century.

In clear, precise, and non-technical language, Chomsky elaborates on fifty years of scientific development in the study of language, sketching how his own work has implications for the origins of language, the close relations that language bears to thought, and its eventual biological basis. He expounds and criticizes many alternative theories, such as those that emphasize the social, the communicative, and the referential aspects of language. Chomsky reviews how newdiscoveries about language overcome what seemed to be highly problematicassumptions in the past. He also investigates the apparent scope and limits of human cognitive capacities and what the human mind can seriously investigate, in the light of history of science and philosophical reflection and current understanding. Moving from language and mind to society and politics, he concludes with a searching exploration and philosophical defense of a position he describes as “libertarian socialism,” tracing its links to anarchism and the ideas of John Dewey, and even briefly to the ideas of Marx and Mill, demonstrating its conceptual growth out of our historical past and urgent relation to matters of the present.

WAS FueR LEBEWESEN SIND WIR?
Deutsch von Michael Schiffmann
[HC Suhrkamp 09/16]
Available products
Book

Published 2015-12-01 by Columbia University Press

Comments

There is no living political writer who has more radically changed how more people think in more parts of the world about political issues. - Glenn Greenwald

A master class taint by a master, and if someone were to ask me what exactly is it that academics do, I would point to these lectures and say, simply, here it is, the thing itself. - Stanley Fish