Grammar is a word associated with the rules that govern language and its related pedagogy for articulating types of declarative knowledge. It can also refer to the organizational structure of practices and their related forms of knowledge, as described here by Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Essence is expressed in grammar.... Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar.)”1 Wittgenstein’s remark about theology can be generalized to visual art, and, by extension, to the grammatical structure (...) of art education. The grammar of creative practices is described by George Steiner as the “articulate organisation of perception, reflection and experience, the nerve structure of consciousness when.. (shrink)

Wonder can be found in human creativity as well as in nature. While one version of belief in inspiration precludes human creativity, another presupposes it. Margaret Boden, however, suggests that creativity is continuous with generic human powers, and arises through breaking recognised rules. Problems are raised for this latter view. It needs to be added that creativity commonly involves participation in a tradition of skill or craftsmanship, and in a creative community. Further, the continuity approach is argued to be (...) consistent with a version of the inspiration approach, according to which the Creator can communicate through minds reflective of his/her creative imagination, as suggested by Austin Farrer. (shrink)

This paper introduces a novel perspective on Agentive Cognitive Construction Grammar (AgCCxG) by examining the intricate interplay between mind and language through the lens of both Active Inference and Peircean semiotics. AgCCxG emphasizes the impact of intention and purpose on linguistic choices as a cognitive imperative to balance the symbolic Self (Intelligent Agent) with the dynamics of the environment. Among other things, the paper posits that linguistic constructions, particularly Constructional Attachment Patterns (CAPs), like argument structure constructions, embody experienced interactions (...) with the world through reenactment routines via the integration of multisensory channels. Unlike traditional usage-based approaches (e.g., construction grammars), AgCCxG embraces a robust theory of signs that reveals human representation as a continuous process of semiotic hybridization for the creative prediction of uncertain scenarios. Importantly, the paper challenges the notion of the mind as a unified, rational, uncertainty-reducing machine by asserting that physical processes governing open biological systems profoundly influence the linguistic sign system. Intelligent agents’ adaptability in expressing incongruous realities thus highlights the role of semiotic hybridization in preserving an agent’s autonomy and semiotic boundary. (shrink)

Nicholas Allott considers Chomsky at ninety. [This is a short introduction to Chomsky's linguistic work, its implications for our knowledge about language and the mind, and its connections with the political philosophy that is implicit in his work on international relations and the media. I argue that Chomsky's contribution to linguistics, cognitive science and philosophy should not be controversial. He has been a major influence on the computational/representational view of the mind that is now taken for granted in serious work (...) in linguistics and cognitive psychology. His work in linguistics revolutionised the field, leading to the discovery of grammatical principles with considerable explanatory power, and has shifted the burden against those who oppose Universal Grammar: an innate, domain-specific system that underlies our linguistic abilities. Chomsky's political work includes detailed critiques of US and other Western policy, particularly foreign policy, and, with Edward Herman, a model that seeks to explain how radical opinions and inconvenient facts are excluded from the media. Chomsky also has a political philosophy, although he does not set it out in detail. He sees human beings as intrinsically creative and with an instinct for freedom, and he takes these features of human nature to favour a libertarian socialist society.]. (shrink)

Play and the Artist’s Creative Process explores a continuity between childhood play and adult creativity. The volume examines how an understanding of play can shed new light on processes that recur in the work of Philip Guston and Eduardo Paolozzi. Both artists’ distinctive engagement with popular culture is seen as connected to the play materials available in the landscapes of their individual childhoods. Animating or toying with material to produce the unforeseen outcome is explored as the central force at (...) work in the artists’ processes. By engaging with a range of play theories, the book shows how the artists’ studio methods can be understood in terms of game strategies. (shrink)

This book addresses fundamental issues in linguistic theory, including the relation between formal and cognitive approaches, the autonomy of syntax, the content of universal grammar, and the value of generative and functional approaches to grammar. It focuses on the grammar of case relations, signalled by morphological case, prepositions, and word order. Part I offers a critical history of modern grammars of case, focussing on the last four decades and setting this in the context of earlier, including ancient, (...) developments. The subjects considered include the evolution of ideas concerning deep structure and semantic and grammatical relations, and arguments for the maintenance of the traditional central position of case in the grammar. In parts II and III Professor Anderson examines the category of case and central unresolved issues in the grammar of case. The latter include questions relating to the idea of an ontologically-based grammar, particularly the degree to which syntactic categories and relationships are grounded in meaning, and the notion of linguistic creativity. This involves a consideration of the way in which cases may be identified and whether their distribution is determined through semantics. The book sheds new light on the interactions between meaning and grammar and on the structure and development of lexical and grammatical systems. The argument and its far-reaching consequences will be of wide interest to linguists, philosophers and others seeking to understand the workings of language. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the scholastic technique of the Theravāda scholar-monk Chapaṭa Saddhammajotipāla. Chapaṭa is the author of several scholastic treatises in Pāli, the most voluminous of which is the Suttaniddesa, a commentary on the Pāli grammar of Kaccāyana. I offer a general introduction to the Pāli grammatical tradition and especially to the Pāli grammatical tradition of Burma, together with an introduction to the life and works of Chapaṭa. I also offer the first annotated translation of a passage from (...) the Suttaniddesa and in this way I show how the scholastic technique of Chapaṭa is based on a precise use of quotations, mainly from other Pāli or Sanskrit grammatical texts, but also from Buddhist literature. I finally give a preliminary assessment of typology and purpose of every different type of quotation. Although this paper consists mainly of preliminary work, it is the first essay entirely devoted to the Suttaniddesa, which is one of the most important grammatical works in the Theravāda tradition. (shrink)

Nowadays, creativity has become one of the most important determinants of the development of modern economy. In it lies the potential for economic success not only of entire regions, but above all of business entities. Although creativity is difficult to define, it more frequently becomes the subject of scholarly considerations. In this study, an attempt was made to explore the climate for creativity because it determines the development of creativity and creative attitudes in creative sectors. The main research (...) goal was to show the importance and pattern of the determinants creating a climate conducive to creativity and its impact on the development of creative industries. The method of the study was a critical analysis of the source literature and the author’s own research. The aim of the work became the basis for formulating the following research hypothesis: recognising the components constituting a pattern of the climate conducive to creativity in the city will enable better development of entities included in the creative sector. In order to achieve the set goal and verify the research hypothesis, quantitative and qualitative research was carried out among representatives of creative professions employed in the creative sectors. (shrink)

This research explores an innovative application of social media platforms, particularly Instagram live streaming sessions and language courses on YouTube, to improve proficiency in speaking and grammar of foreign language undergraduates. It investigated the effects of various social media platforms on language competence and to evaluate the relevance of these platforms to language teaching. The study used a pretest-post-test experiment methodology with a sample size of 392 individuals, who were split into groupings: Control and Experimental. To compare the means (...) of the speaking proficiency and grammatical proficiency scores, t-tests were used as an analytical method. The results indicated that the groups were not significantly different from one another on the pretest, which served as a baseline for the assessment. Nevertheless, the results of the post-test demonstrated a significant rise in the Experimental Group's grammar proficiency (mean = 74.38), supporting the first hypothesis, which states that learning a language through social media can improve one's grammar skills. Just as the control group showed no change in their speaking abilities, the experimental group showed a marked improvement, with a mean score that pointed to increased proficiency. These results show that using YouTube and Instagram in language classes is an effective strategy, showing that it has real-world applications and inspiring teachers to be creative in their methods so that students learn languages more interestingly and engagingly. (shrink)

There are many problems of universals, at least the four distinguished by Jenny Teichmann. Consider her second one. ‘How can we form a general term when we are faced with easily distinguishable, widely differing examples?’ The term ‘blue’, for example, covers a wide range of—well, what does it cover a wide range of? A wide range of the colour blue? This is nonsense. What it covers is a wide range of blues —shades of blue. But we do not form a (...) general term when faced with or referring to these items. We distinguish them: cerulean, ultramarine, cyan, cobalt, navy blue and so on. ‘Blue’ is not the name of any of these shades of blue. It does not ‘cover’ anything except the colour , of which it is the name. ‘Blue’ is the name of the colour blue. There are no widely differing, easily distinguishable examples of that . The colour blue cannot differ widely or easily be distinguished from the colour blue. Leibniz's law prevents it. It is shades of blue which differ and are easily distinguishable. The moment we try to say, ‘But this differs from that’, the question will be, ‘This and that what? ’ If the answer is, ‘This colour ’ and ‘That colour ’, then a mistake has been made. For there is no differing and distinguishing in this case. Teichmann's problem cannot even be stated. If we say that what differ are this blue and that blue, which is the right thing to say, then we have two count nouns which mean ‘shade of blue’. There is no general term for these different shades. There is no answer to the question, ‘What is the name of all these differing shades?’ Certainly they are all blues, but each has its own name, and it is not ‘blue’. Teichmann's question cannot arise here either. The question, ‘What do blues have in common in virtue of which they are blue?’ is either elliptical or bad logical grammar. Which it is depends on the construal, or misconstrual, of ‘are blue’. The question should be either, ‘…in virtue of which they are blues ’ in the plural— they are not identical with the colour blue—or ‘…in virtue of which they are shades of blue.’ The plural agreement must come somewhere. (shrink)

Film Theory addresses the core concepts and arguments created or used by academics, critical film theorists, and filmmakers, including the work of Dudley Andrew, Raymond Bellour, Mary Ann Doane, Miriam Hansen, bell hooks, Siegfried Kracauer, Raul Ruiz, P. Adams Sitney, Bernard Stiegler, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. This volume takes the position that film theory is a form of writing that produces a unique cinematic grammar; and like all grammars, it forms part of the system of rules that govern a (...) language, and is thus applicable to wider range of media forms. In their creation of authorial trends, identification of the technology of cinema as a creative force, and production of films as aesthetic markers, film theories contribute an epistemological resource that connects the technologies of filmmaking and film composition. This book explores these connections through film theorisations of processes of the diagrammatisation of cinematic matters of the filmic world. (shrink)

Language sciences have long maintained a close and supposedly necessary coupling between the infinite productivity of the human language faculty and recursive grammars. Because of the formal equivalence between recursion and non-recursive iteration; recursion, in the technical sense, is never a necessary component of a generative grammar. Contrary to some assertions this equivalence extends to both center-embedded relative clauses and hierarchical parse trees. Inspection of language usage suggests that recursive rule components in fact contribute very little, and likely nothing (...) significant, to linguistic creativity. Further than this, if the productivity of human language is considered as not rigidly bound, but not infinite, then the need for any sort of iteration in generative grammars vanishes and can be replaced with a Non-iterative Explicit Alternatives Rule grammar. The knock-on effects of dispensing with recursive grammar components are: that language diversity can simply be based on rule and lexicon combinatorics with no potentially infinite dimensions derived from recursive or iterative components of rules; the oddity of a vast, multiply-infinite competence set of ‘grammatical but unacceptable’ productions is gone; and the development of a language faculty based on rules that eschew iterative rule components avoids any need for explaining ‘special’ mechanisms. On the broader front of searching for the mechanisms of mind, our analysis can be similarly applied to the proposals for a recursive basis for mind as an explanation for humanity’s great leap forward. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880Robert GrudinThe Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, by D. G. Myers; 224 pp. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996, $30.40 paper.D. G. Myers opens his history of creating writing instruction in America with an anecdote: When Vladimir Nabokov was proposed for a chair in literature at Harvard, Roman Jakobson objected. “What’s next?” he said. “Shall we appoint [End (...) Page 529] elephants to teach zoology?” This question not only provides Myers’s book with its title but also suggests a major issue of literary pedagogy: is the teaching of literature the province of philologists and theorists who interpret books, or is it the province of authors who write them? Jakobson the philologist implies that writers, who just produce the stuff, lack knowledge of interpretive method and thus have little business in the classroom. Others—writers and teachers alike—have thought differently and have over the past century fostered the growth of creative writing at American colleges and high schools.The Elephants Teach is a comprehensive and coherent effort to deal with a ponderous mass of history and discourse: the development of writing curricula since 1880 and the ongoing professional dialogue about the proper relationship between writing and teaching. The first four of his seven chapters deal with roots and preliminaries: the rise of literature instruction as philology after the Civil War, the inception of English composition at Harvard (championed by Adams Sherman Hill, Barrett Wendell, Dean Le Baron Briggs, and Charles Townsend Copeland), and the professional, cultural, and financial forces drawing writers to campuses in the early twentieth century. These chapters establish three major forces leading to the rise of the creative writing curriculum: the consensus that writing experience is of value to the individual and society, the reiterated conviction that literary instruction should consider the perspective of the writer, and the broad recognition by “serious” writers, who had little or no access to the mass market, that they could agreeably support themselves in the classroom. These forces would lead to what Myers correctly sees as a massive compromise: a complex of writing programs simultaneously satisfying students’ needs and allowing thousands of writers to pursue, if only by fits and starts, their professional calling.Myers then serves up the main course: a three-chapter narrative, stretching from the 1920s down to the present, of the history of creative writing as a so-named and self-conscious institution in American education. The opening of this section is not only informative but characteristic of the overall lucidity of Myers’s style: “Creative writing was first taught under its own name in the 1920s. It began in junior high school where it was originally conducted as an experiment to replace traditional English—grammar, spelling, penmanship, even literature classes—with something more appealing to young people. As such it was part of a broader movement to reform American education in the first half of the twentieth century. The cry was that subjects should not be taught, students should; the reform movement called itself progressive education. Creative writing was invented to transport progressive methods and materials into a junior-high-school English classroom. The man who invented it was a progressive educator—once well known, now largely forgotten—named Hughes Mearns” (p. 101). William Hughes Mearns (1875–1965) was himself a disciple of John Dewey, whose ideas formed the basis for progressive education in general. Adapting the Deweyan concept of learning as a spur to personal [End Page 530] development, Mearns saw writing “as the efficient cause of an education in which the final cause was personal growth” (pp. 104–11).After Mearns, Myers considers a somewhat more familiar chapter in history: the appearance of creative writing as a self-contained discipline on the college campus. Credit for the original initiative goes to Norman Foerster (1887–1972), who in 1930 took over the newly-founded School of Letters at the University of Iowa. A follower of Irving Babbitt and the “new humanism,” Foerster set out (in his own words) “to give all types of literary students a rigorous and appropriate discipline” (p. 126). Foerster’s “discipline” was a varied curriculum including... (shrink)

‘Creative destruction’ is one of the most important analytical tools, taking into consideration both the economic and sociological characteristics of capitalist society. According to Schumpeter, in the long term, evolution gives rise to economic development resulting from batches of innovative solutions, leading to improvements in the standard of living. The innovation activity of firms is based on supply-side factors, hence it is large enterprises that excel in innovation since they strive to achieve a monopoly market position and above-average profits. (...) Schumpeter attempts to combine two elements: the spread of monopolies and the continuation of economic development, both occurring through innovation, which is far more important than price competition. The Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’ permeates the main aspects of macroeconomic activity, not only in the long term, but also in the area of economic fluctuations, structural changes, or the functioning of markets. As a result, it becomes a factor determining changes in the economic order. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of territories in the process of creating and using knowledge and its impact on the economic efficiency of the companies which function within their boundaries. Regional cooperation increases the involvement of business entities in innovation activities, which translates into higher competitiveness of firms. Moreover, the awareness of the necessity of cooperation and use of innovation capital tends to grow. (shrink)

A remarkable philosophical affinity may be observed between the intuitionistic conception of mathematics and the transformational generative approach to the study of language: both disciplines profess a mentalistic ontology, both posit an idealized subject, and both insist on their autonomy with respect to other disciplines. This philosophical parallel is formalized in terms of a generalization of the intuitionistic notion of creative subject; resulting are the foundations of a unified theory of mental acts based on intuitionistic logic — capturing, inter (...) alia, similarities between proof acts and speech acts. As an application of the theory, it is then shown how the notion of mental act may provide for an insightful formalization of various hypotheses pertaining to the linguistic dependence or relativity of mathematics. (shrink)

Although declarations of the death of God seem to be provocations announcing the end of the era of theology, this announcement is actually central to the Christian revelation in its most classic forms, as well as to its reworkings in contemporary religious thought. Indeed provocative new possibilities for thinking theologically open up precisely in the wake of the death of God. Already Hegel envisaged a revolutionary new realization of divinity emerging in and with the secular world through its establishment of (...) a total order of immanence. However, in postmodern times this comprehensive order aspired to by modern secularism implodes or cracks open towards the wholly Other. A hitherto repressed demand for the absolute difference of the religious, or for “transcendence”, returns with a vengeance. This difference is what could not be stated in terms of the Hegelian System, for reasons that poststructuralist writers particularly have insisted on: all representations of God are indeed dead. Yet this does not mean that they cannot still be powerful, but only that they cannot assign God any stable identity. Nietzsche’s sense of foreboding concerning the death of God is coupled with his intimations of the demise of representation and “grammar” as epistemologically bankrupt, but also with his vision of a positive potential for creating value in the wake of this collapse of all linguistically articulated culture. He points the way towards the emergence of a post-secular religious thinking of what exceeds thought and representation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ecological Footprints: An Essential Franciscan Guide for Faith and Sustainable Living by Dawn Nothwehr, and: The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity by Willis JenkinsJeffrey MorganEcological Footprints: An Essential Franciscan Guide for Faith and Sustainable Living Dawn Nothwehr Collegevile, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012. 368pp. $39.95The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity Willis Jenkins Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013. 304pp. $34.95Dawn M. (...) Nothwehr, OSF, and Willis Jenkins have written, so it seems, incommensurable books about the relation of religion to environmental problems. The central issue between them is whether or not it is possible to move from a theological tradition to fitting, ecologically responsible moral action. Nothwehr is quite confident that we can, and the first half of her Ecological Footprints: An Essential Franciscan Guide for Faith and Sustainable Living is, as the title suggests, a primer in Franciscan theology that moves toward a theology of sustainable living. After two opening chapters on scripture and the environment, the distinctly Franciscan quality of the guide really begins as Nothwehr surveys, over four chapters, the cornerstones of Franciscan theology: Clair, Francis, Bonaventure, and Scotus. Nothwehr’s main effort in these chapters is to draw out major themes in each figure’s work and to suggest how these themes might inform a contemporary ethics of sustainability. With heavy reliance on contemporary scholarship, Nothwehr covers significant ground: creation, the Trinity, Christology, sacramental theology, deification, panentheism, theological anthropology, and more. The effect is a bit dizzying, but a few focal lenses emerge. Across these major figures there is, Nothwehr contends, a profound commitment to the interrelatedness of all things, kinship throughout cosmos, [End Page 219] and the need for mutual respect among all creatures; all this is grounded in a vision of the Incarnation as the divine affirmation and deification of all things (121). That is, the Incarnation is the fullest revelation of the mutual love between the persons of the Trinity that shines forth throughout the creation and that summons each of us to treat all creatures as equals, as brothers and sisters united in one household (94). The ethical takeaway is straightforward: if we really held these (or similar) theological convictions, our ecological habits should follow suit (see, for example, 86).The difficulty is that environmental problems are complex and confuse our moral agency; furthermore, there is a general “spiritual malaise” that reinforces an entrenched apathy to do anything about those problems. The second half of the book takes up these complex problems, and it is there that Nothwehr hits her stride. Chapters 7 through 10 are all well-done exposés that guide the reader through the intricacies of subtle, systemic injustices that conspire to reinforce global warming (chapter 7), the global water crisis (chapter 8), problems of food access and security (chapter 9), and the crisis of peak oil and sustainable energy (chapter 10). The connection between these exposés and the earlier chapters on particular Franciscan theologians is loose but significant. While the earlier themes are not so much worked into the later chapters as they are very briefly referenced and invoked here and there, the point is that these themes from this tradition have the capacity to awaken us from our malaise and help us take responsibility for our world. In short, the Franciscan tradition, as a distinct theological worldview, can provide both motivation and a fair amount of practical guidance to help us confront the environmental problems facing us.Nothwehr’s book is the kind of book Willis Jenkins claims he initially set out to write: a book that helps us see how “theology matters to processes of cultural change” and provides “grammars of belief” sufficient to “generate satisfactory responses to representative problems of human power” (vii). But in setting out to write such a book, Jenkins found that such problems overwhelm the moral repertoires of religious traditions. Environmental problems, in particular, frustrate attempts simply to put ideas into practice. This is not to say religious traditions can only be found wanting before the contemporary slate of overwhelming problems; rather, such problems provide religious traditions with opportunities for constructive reevaluation and renewal of their... (shrink)

In this essay, I evaluate the extent to which some currents in classical Christian mysticism might count as properly ‘Christian’ against the rules of faith and theological methodology of thinkers like Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Justin Martyr. I begin by expounding this methodology as it relates to non-Christian philosophical traditions, and from there explore the rules these thinkers offer, suggesting that the beating heart of these rules is not a string of propositions to affirm so much as it is a commitment (...) to a certain rendition of biblical narrative grammar. After exploring this grammar, I turn to a brief discussion of the foundations of Christian mysticism and the thought of Evagrius Ponticus. The aim here is to illustrate the theoretical foundations of much Christian mysticism, as well as to provide a test case to evaluate how far some prominent elements of this discourse might, or might not, cohere with the biblical narrative grammar elucidated above. I argue that there is ample room to question the legitimacy of Evagrius’s claim to properly Christian theorizing, and suggest this has serious implications for future Christian work in the philosophy of mysticism. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of original contributions from outstanding scholars in linguistics, philosophy and computational linguistics exploring the relation between word meaning and human linguistic creativity. The papers present different aspects surrounding the question of what is word meaning, a problem that has been the center of heated debate in all those disciplines that directly or indirectly are concerned with the study of language and of human cognition. The discussions are centered around the newly emerging view of the mental (...) lexicon, as outlined in the Generative Lexicon theory (Pustejovsky, 1995), which proposes a unified model for defining word meaning. The individual contributors present their evidence for a generative approach as well as critical perspectives, which provides for a volume where word meaning is not viewed only from a particular angle or from a particular concern, but from a wide variety of topics, each introduced and explained by the editors. (shrink)

We usually consider literary thinking to be peripheral and dispensable, an activity for specialists: poets, prophets, lunatics, and babysitters. Certainly we do not think it is the basis of the mind. We think of stories and parables from Aesop's Fables or The Thousand and One Nights, for example, as exotic tales set in strange lands, with spectacular images, talking animals, and fantastic plots--wonderful entertainments, often insightful, but well removed from logic and science, and entirely foreign to the world of everyday (...) thought. But Mark Turner argues that this common wisdom is wrong. The literary mind--the mind of stories and parables--is not peripheral but basic to thought. Story is the central principle of our experience and knowledge. Parable--the projection of story to give meaning to new encounters--is the indispensable tool of everyday reason. Literary thought makes everyday thought possible. This book makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking. In The Literary Mind, Turner ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, as he explains how story and projection--and their powerful combination in parable--are fundamental to everyday thought. In simple and traditional English, he reveals how we use parable to understand space and time, to grasp what it means to be located in space and time, and to conceive of ourselves, other selves, other lives, and other viewpoints. He explains the role of parable in reasoning, in categorizing, and in solving problems. He develops a powerful model of conceptual construction and, in a far-reaching final chapter, extends it to a new conception of the origin of language that contradicts proposals by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. Turner argues that story, projection, and parable precede grammar, that language follows from these mental capacities as a consequence. Language, he concludes, is the child of the literary mind. Offering major revisions to our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origin and nature of language, The Literary Mind presents a unified theory of central problems in cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It gives new and unexpected answers to classic questions about knowledge, creativity, understanding, reason, and invention. (shrink)

Exocentric compounding is a creative morphological process that contributes to the English lexicon. However, because it lacks a syntactic or semantic head, it was deemed an exceptional case in most word-formation literature and hence neglected. Previous work has only been limited to syntax-based grammar and the notion of headedness and thus failed to address the other linguistic rules that constrain exocentric compounds. The current paper aims to identify the frequency of exocentric compounds and thus to determine their viability. (...) The research will also look into how conceptual metaphor and/or conceptual metonymy motivate exocentric compound formation. The results demonstrate that exocentric compounds are viable lexical units, generating content words (e.g., adjectives and adverbs) through productive word-formation processes, and extending word senses. The results also suggest that conceptual metonymy is more active than conceptual metaphor in the formation of exocentric compounds. The present findings have several implications for research on exocentric compounds, conceptual metonymy and conceptual metaphor. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kenneth Burke on Dialectical-Rhetorical TranscendenceJames P. ZappenKenneth Burke's concept of rhetoric is complex and elusive, increasingly so as it becomes intertwined and infused with dialectic in the long third part of A Rhetoric of Motives and in some essays published shortly thereafter (1951; 1955; 1969b [1950], 183–333).1 The connection between Burke's rhetoric and dialectic is well established (Brummett 1995; Crusius 1986; 1999, 120–21; Wess 1996, 136–216; Wolin 2001, 143–204), (...) and his concept of rhetoric as identification is widely recognized for its broadening of the traditional view of rhetoric as persuasion to include identification as a means of inducing cooperation and building communities (Crusius 1999, 120–21; Hauser 1986, 120–37; Henderson 1988, 33–34). Timothy W. Crusius establishes the fundamental relationship between A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives as dialectical and rhetorical counterparts and explains both the strengths and the limitations of identification as a means of inducing cooperation (1986). According to Crusius, dialectic explores the substance of a person or thing—all that "supports or 'substands'" it—from multiple and shifting perspectives, viewing human action dramatistically as act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose (24–28). Rhetoric complements dialectic and its multiple dramatistic perspectives by promoting "identification" and "cooperation," building "a community, a sense of oneness amid diversity of conflicting interests and values" (28–30). As Crusius and others observe, [End Page 279] however, identification as a means of inducing cooperation is inherently limited since any identification necessarily also entails a division: "Every 'us' requires a 'them'" (29; Biesecker 1997, 47–49; Wolin 2001, 177–78). Thus, for example, while Christianity provides a powerful instance of identification, it also provides an equally powerful illustration of its division from other peoples—"Satan and his counter-kingdom," "the Turk infidel," and "the pagan hordes of Asia" (28–29). For Burke, these divisions were largely political (George and Selzer 2007, 16–57, 110–32; Lentricchia 1983, 21–38). For us, they are differences of gender, culture, and economic and social class (Condit 1992), compounded by political, economic, and religious differences on a global scale. By this account, the first two parts of the Rhetoric offer at best a partial solution to the problem. The third part challenges and mystifies and in itself seems to offer little more than a utopian vision without purpose or outcome (Crusius 1999, 120–21; Wess 1996, 211–16; Wolin 2001, 201–3).2 Situated within the broader context of Burke's work, however, the third part seems rather to offer a bold and creative solution to the problem by merging dialectic and rhetoric with dialogue and poetic myth in a dialectical-rhetorical transcendence—a concept that merits a place alongside identification as a major contribution to rhetorical theory (1969b, 197–208, 221–33).3Burke's concept of dialectical-rhetorical transcendence developed over the course of more than twenty years, from the mid 1930s to the mid 1950s and beyond. Its sources are partly Hegelian and Marxist but increasingly Platonic,4 as Burke comes to perceive the Hegelian and Marxist concepts of history as part of the problem of competing ideologies and his version of Platonic transcendence as the solution—a solution that leads, on the one hand, toward "pure persuasion" and "ultimate identification" and, on the other, toward the pragmatics of a new rhetoric and a revolutionary program of lifelong education (1951; 1955; 1969b, 267–94, 328–33; Biesecker 1997, 43–47; Lee 2004; Wess 1996, 203–5, 211–16; Wolin 2001, 201–3). In the midst of the political divisiveness of the 1930s, Burke glimpsed in Hegel and even Marx the possibility of bridging conflicting ideologies via transcendence, but he turned to Plato in the Grammar and again in the Rhetoric to explain the processes by which opposing ideas and ideologies might merge in transcendent visions or myths that encompass what he perceived to be partial and partisan points of view. In the Grammar, his solution is dialectical—a merger of opposing ideas at higher levels of generalization through a process of linguistic abstraction and transformation that respects a diversity of individual interests, even as it seeks to transcend them in larger [End... (shrink)

This paper seeks to chart a concept of historical experience that French Romantic writers first developed to describe their own relationship to historical time: the notion of the “transitional period.” At first, the term related strictly to the evolving periodic conception of history, one that required breaks, spaces, or zones of indeterminacy to bracket off periods imagined as organic wholes. These transitions, necessary devices in the new grammar of history, also began to attract interest on their own, conceived either (...) as chaotic but creative times of transformation, or, more often, as slack periods of decadence that possessed no proper style but exhibited hybrid traits. Their real interest, however, lies in their reflexive application to the nineteenth century itself, by writers and historians such as Alfred de Musset, Chateaubriand, Michelet, and Renan, who in their effort to define their own period envisioned the “transitional period” as a passage between more coherent and stable historical formations. This prospective self-definition of the “age of history” from a future standpoint is very revealing; it shows not just the tension between its organic way of apprehending the past and its own self-perception, but it also opens a window on a new and paradoxical experience of time, one in which change is ceaseless and an end in itself. The paper also presents a critique of the way the term “modernity” has functioned, from Baudelaire’s initial use to the present, to occlude the experience of transition that the Romantics highlighted. By imposing on the nineteenth-century sense of the transitory a heroic period designation, the term “modernity” denies precisely the reality it describes, and sublimates a widespread temporal malaise into its contrary. The paper concludes that the peculiarly “modern” mania for naming one’s period is a function of transitional time, and that the concept coined by the Romantics still governs our contemporary experience. (shrink)

Until recently, cognitive science focused on such mental functions as problem solving, grammar, and pattern-the functions in which the human mind most closely resembles a computer. But humans are more than computers: we invent new meanings, imagine wildly, and even have ideas that have never existed before. Today the cutting edge of cognitive science addresses precisely these mysterious, creative aspects of the mind.The Way We Think is a landmark analysis of the imaginative nature of the mind. Conceptual blending (...) is already widely known in research laboratories throughout the world; this book, written to be accessible to both lay readers and interested scientists, is its definitive statement. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner show that conceptual blending is the root of the cognitively modern human mind, and that conceptual blends themselves are continually combined and reblended to create the rich mental fabric in which we live.The Way We Think shows how this blending operates; how it is affected by (and gives rise to) language, identity, culture, and invention; and how we imagine what could be and what might have been. The result is a bold and exciting new view of how the mind works. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Who Wrote This?: How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing by Naomi BaronLuke MunnBaron, Naomi. Who Wrote This?: How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing. Stanford University Press, 2023. 344pp.Who Wrote This? is Naomi Baron’s latest book exploring the emergence of AI language models and their potential implications for writing. A linguist, educator, and emeritus professor at American University, Baron should be (...) well placed to tease out the nuances of language, showcase the creativity of human literary canon across history, and deliver a set of findings and recommendations informed by deep experience. Indeed, since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, there is a hunger for this kind of expertise and guidance both inside and outside academia, as the deluge of debates, panels, and forums in the past year have attested. This is the perfect storm, one that should be harnessed by a linguist with two decades of work on digital writing and reading into a powerful book. Instead, the reader must wade through a morass of truisms, historical anecdotes, and wiki-like summaries of research studies, interspersed with surface-level ponderings.The problems begin almost immediately with the structure of the book itself. While the book is ostensibly divided into chapters, each chapter is atomized into dozens of subsections, some no more than a paragraph or two in length. In this whirlwind tour, the reader is swiftly confronted with a jumble of quotes from journalists, jokes about language, historical events, a “laypersons AI roadmap,” and recent news stories, flitting from one to the next with barely a pause. The “AI Applications” section takes this same piecemeal approach, laying out the possible uses of artificial intelligence and then painstakingly stepping through each one. Each subsection features a few paragraphs that regurgitates material you might find, more cohesively and in-depth, in a Wikipedia article. The material on the history of artificial intelligence is handled simplistically and uncritically, skipping across a handful of heroic figures like Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Fei-Fei Li.While anecdotes and quotes abound, an argument is much harder to locate. On the one hand, Baron seems to uncritically echo the AI hype that has dominated news headlines in the past year. “We’ve come a long way,” she opines, “we have vacuum cleaning robots, drones, and self-driving [End Page 156] cars” (59). The reader learns that AI can generate poetry, correct grammar, play games, and beat masters (AlphaGo), and even identify cancer (machine learning for mammograms). These use-cases, and the ambitious claims that accompany them, are never really challenged in any sustained theoretical or methodological way. On the other hand, Baron seems to be highly conservative when it comes to the proper domain of “the human” and of writing in particular. “AI isn’t up for self-expression or thinking” (14) she says in passing, dismissing the recent revolutionary improvements in large language models that she’s just hyped up.The possibility of machinic intelligence and creativity, in fact, is a fascinating if messy one. Turing was not so interested in demonstrably “proving” that computers could be intelligent, but instead (and very much in line with his everyday navigation of British sexual norms) in developing something that could “pass” as human. Intelligence was not an acid-test, but a set of gestures that could be performed or pantomimed, emulated until they were “good enough” to deceive. N. Katherine Hayles has continued this trajectory in her work on “non-conscious cognition,” removing the barriers to what qualifies as intelligence and subsequently extending cognition down to unicellular organisms and plants. Within my own work on language models alongside colleagues (Munn et al. 2023; Magee, Munn, and Arora 2023), we highlight how models like GPT 3.5 achieve an approximation of natural speech. What is important is not the authenticity or actual intelligence of this feat, but that this “good enough” ability means that users treat language models as an interlocutor, a listener, a subject. This projection, even if misplaced, opens up this interaction and requires a conceptualization that is at least as attuned to memory, affect, and subjectivity as software interfaces and linear... (shrink)

This article focuses on multiculturalism in the context of present-day societies and the need to incorporate minorities within a reframed social order. In his critical theory, Axel Honneth rightly draws attention to the idea of the moral grammar of struggles for recognition. Analyzing his theory in depth, the article shows that Honneth underestimates the violent power of ideological discourse in marginalizing and excluding society’s others, e.g. cultural minorities. It then puts forward an alternative approach based on Ricœur’s creative (...) and original reflections on ideology and utopia. For the incorporation of cultural minorities to occur, the symbolic order of society needs to be critiqued, transformed and expanded. From this perspective, the author highlights the subversive and transformative strength of utopian counter-narratives. The latter form a vital resource for cultural minorities in their struggle for recognition. (shrink)

In Chapter IV of his Schreiben und Denken , the Austrian linguist Hanspeter Ortner distinguishes and describes ten writing strategies (“Schreibstrategien”). One of them is “syncretistic writing”. 1 A simple application of Ortner’s defi nition and description of syncretistic writing to the genesis of the Philosophical Investigations (PI) makes clear that the PI can be said to be of syncretistic origin. 2 Wittgenstein’s writing of the PI 3 can be characterized by Ortner’s eight features of syncretistic: his writing (1) hops (...) all over the place (“Sprunghaftigkeit”); (2) combines disparate elements from his writings (“Verbindung von weit Auseinanderliegendem”); (3) is semantically open, under-determined and under-determining (“Unterdeterminiertheit und semantische Offenheit”); (4) postpones gestalt-formation/ elaboration (“Aufschub der Gestaltbildung”); (5) invites and offers many opportunities for creative ideas (“viele Chancen für und Einladungen an den kreativen Einfall”); (6) gives freedom to choose the points of departure and reference (“Freiheit bei der Wahl des/der Startpunktes/e und des/der Gesichtspunktes/e”); (7) is hierarchically under-determined (“hierarchische Unterbestimmtheit”); (8) works side-by-side with the already “fi nished” and the newly begun, which implies long text building processes and parallel operations (“lange ‘Bauzeit’ und Nebeneinander von Fertiggestelltem und Neubegonnenem”). 4 -/- In the following, I will try to show in more detail how the genesis of the PI is characterized by these eight features. First, the writings that constitute the PI’s genesis are characterized by a strong discrepancy between the sequence of remarks in their textual order and the sequence of remarks in their physical order. Texts are put together from chronologically and argumentatively dispersed units. One example is Wittgenstein’s rearrangement of remarks from an earlier dictation (TS 208) into a new text in 1930 (TS 209, published by Rush Rhees as Philosophical Remarks ). In this new text, he abandoned both the original argumentative order and the chronological order and did not necessarily obey the criteria of consistency and coherence, not even on linguistic levels such as demonstrative reference. The work that -/- emerges is seen by many as an unordered agglomerate of remarks, although I have argued that this view can be challenged. 5 The second example is the revision and rearrangement of the so-called Big Typescript (TS 213) in 1933-34, which is paradigmatic in its triple use of (1) the text in the typescript, (2) the handwritten revisions of it in the typescript, and (3) text in other manuscripts. In his edition of the Philosophical Grammar (1969), Rush Rhees has tried to take this complicated network of revisions into account and to follow it painstakingly and faithfully; by looking at the manuscript sources for this edition 6 one realizes how much “hopping all over the place” was going on in the originals. Thirdly, MS 142, the “Urfassung” of the PI, was produced in 1936-37 from remarks stemming from different places in manuscripts and typescripts and various loci of discourse. MS 157b, 13v, contains a list of references to pages in TS 213 from which parts of the text were to be taken to write the “philosophy chapter” of this fi rst PI version; other sources include MS 140 (last page), MS 152, MS 156a, MS 156b and MS 157a, all yielding materials, lists and drafts for the text of MS 142. The fi nal example is TS 228: in the later stages of the PI genesis, Wittgenstein selected about 400 remarks from this typescript to include in TS 227, the typescript used as the printer’s copy for the PI. (shrink)

From the invention of the alphabet to the explosion of the internet, Dominic Wyse takes us on a unique journey into the process of writing. Starting with seven extraordinary examples that serve as a backdrop to the themes explored, it pays particular attention to key developments in the history of language, including Aristotle's grammar through socio-cultural multimodality, to pragmatist philosophy of communication. Analogies with music are used as a comparator throughout the book, yielding radically new insights into composition processes. (...) The book presents the first comprehensive analysis of the Paris Review interviews with the world's greatest writers such as Louise Erdrich, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Ted Hughes, and Marilynne Robinson. It critically reviews the most influential guides to styles and standards of language, and presents new research on young people's creativity and writing. Drawing on over twenty years of findings, Wyse presents research-informed innovative practices to demonstrate powerfully how writing can be learned and taught. (shrink)

Ambiguity is not the polysemy most words display as dictionary entries but results from the context's blocking of the reader's choice among competing meanings, as when, to use an example from Derrida, a French context hinders the reader from deciding whether plus de means "lack" or "excess" .1 In this case, the undecidability is due entirely to the fact that the reader is playing a score, the syntax, that will not let him choose. This must be because the score is (...) badly written; yet it is precisely this sort of willful neglect that critics have labeled poetic license, thereby underlining its literary nature. Undecidability has become a central feature in Derrida's analyses of literariness, and it is also the main underpinning of his creative writing.2 Better still, his own critical discourse has put undecidability to use, not a rare case of metalanguage imitating the very devices of the language it purports to analyze. My example are therefore drawn from Derrida on the assumption that his conscious practice of écriture, backed up by a sophisticated theory, will be particularly illuminating. For my own analysis of these phenomena, I shall be using a special word that Derrida has adopted and adapted from the terminology of ancient rhetoric. He proposes it in his commentary on this sentence of Mallarmé's: "La scène n'illustre que l'idée, pas une action effective, dans une hymen . . . entre le désir et l'accomplissement, la perpétration et son souvenir."3 Our critic points out that the grammar prevents the reader from choosing between hymen as "marriage," a symbolic union or fusion, and as "vaginal membrane," the barrier is broken through if desire is to reach what it desires. Undecidability is the effective mechanism of pantomime as an art form since from mimicry alone, without words, the spectator cannot tell whether a dreamed, or a remembered, or a present act is being set forth. This, in turn, Derrida shows to be fundamental to Mallarmé's concept of poetry. It is simply a pun or, as Derrida prefers to call it, a "syllepsis,"4 the trope that consists in understanding the same word in two different ways at the same time, one meaning being literal or primary, the other figurative.5 The second meaning is not just different from and incompatible with the first: it is tied to the first as its polar opposite or the way the reverse of a coin is bound to its obverse—the hymen as unbroken membrane is also metaphorical in both its meanings is irrelevant to its undecidability. What makes it undecidable is not that it is an image but that it embodies a structure, that is, the syllepsis. · 1. See Jacques Derrida's La Dissémination , p. 307.· 2. Because Derrida is a philosopher by trade, one would expect his undecidability to reflect the very precise logical and mathematical concepts of that discipline - which is to say, the limitations inherent in the axiomatic method. Kristeva, for example, tries to do this in her Le Texts du roman: Approche sèmiologique d'une structure discursive transformationnelle , pp. 76-78. So far as I can make out, however , Derrida's critical theory and reading practice do not pack more into the word "undecidable" than does the definition I offer in this paper.· 3. Stephane Mallarmé, Mimique, Oeuvres complètes , p. 310: "the scene [a drama, or rather a pantomime] bodies forth only an idea, not an action: it is like a hymen between desire and its realization, or between an act committed and the memory of it"; here and elsewhere, my translation unless otherwise cited. Derrida's commentary, "La Double Séance," has been rpt. in La Dissémination, pp. 199-317; see esp. pp. 240 ff.· 4. See La Dissémination, p. 249.· 5. This definition has prevailed ever since Dumarsais' treatise, Des Tropes . That syllepsis must be distinguished from the so-called grammatical syllepsis or the zeugma is apparent in Heinrich Lausberg's Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik , pars. 702-7; on the acceptation chosen by Derrida, see pars. 7-8. Michael Riffaterre, Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French Literature and chairman of the department of French and Romance literatures at Columbia University, is the editor of Romantic Review. He is the author of Semiotics of Poetry, La Production du Texte, Typology of Intertextuality and A Grammar of Descriptive Poetry. "Syllepsis" developed out of seminars he led at the Irvine School of Criticism and Theory and at Johns Hopkins University. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose an understanding of philosophy of education as cultural and intercultural work and philosophers of education as cultural and intercultural workers. In our view, the discipline of philosophy of education in North America is currently suffering from measures of insularity and singularity. It is vital that we justly and respectfully engage with and expand our knowledge and understanding of sets of conceptual and life-practice resources, and honor and learn from diverse histories, cultures, and traditions. Such honoring (...) provides responsive conditions for our coming together in and across differences in order that we may productively and creatively address and overturn grammars of violence, destruction, and dis-ease in these complexly troubled times. Committing ourselves to deconstructing historical and contemporary beliefs, values, and practices that are compromising human and planetary flourishing, we undertake responsibilities to go cross-cultural and intercultural. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 39.4 (2006) 333-339MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]On Persuasion, Identification, and Dialectical SymmetryKenneth BurkeEdited with introduction by James ZappenNote: This untitled paper was found in two typed copies among the books and papers in Kenneth Burke's personal library in July 2006—one copy folded into a heavily used Loeb edition of Aristotle's Rhetoric, the other in a small file cabinet in the library.1 The two copies are nearly (...) identical carbon copies, probably typed by Burke's wife Libby; the original has not been found.2 The paper includes brief discussions of persuasion, identification, and dialectical symmetry (hence the current title), plus brief critiques of behaviorism and general semantics, with specific reference to Alfred Korzybski's notion of the structural differential. It was probably written in the mid-1940s, after the second edition of Korzybski's Science and Sanity and The Philosophy of Literary Form, both published in 1941; perhaps at roughly the same time as the more extended discussions of behaviorism and Korzybski in A Grammar of Motives, published in 1945; and before the full development of Burke's ideas about persuasion, identification, and dialectical symmetry in A Rhetoric of Motives, published in 1950. The paper might have been prepared for a public lecture or for circulation among Burke's literary friends, as a brief commentary on some of the key concepts in A Rhetoric of Motives, while he was completing A Grammar of Motives or perhaps shortly following its publication. If so, then it might have been written as late as 1947.3This paper suggests that Burke's concept of identification was in part a creative response to current issues in behaviorism and general semantics, formulated in sympathy with George Herbert Mead's observations on identification, communication, and community in Mind, Self, and Society and The Philosophy of the Act and in opposition to Korzybski's general semantics and his structural differential. Moreover, and more important, this paper suggests that the final section of A Rhetoric of Motives, titled simply "Order," is essential to a complete understanding of Burke's ideas about persuasion and identification since only in this last section does Burke show how competing points of view [End Page 333] might be reconciled in an ultimate identification via the dialectical symmetry that he traces through the long history of Platonic thought.4James P. Zappen Department of Language, Literature, and Communication Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute* * *What, in sum, would be the salient traits of Aristotle's Rhetoric?5 And what would be our attitude towards them?His "art" is constructed about his stress upon persuasion as the purpose of rhetoric. Hence he surveys the resources of rhetoric, to the end that one might use the best means available for a given situation. To narrow down the choice of means, he makes a division into kinds of oratory: deliberative (concerned with the expediency of steps still to be taken); forensic (concerned with the justice or injustice of past acts); and demonstrative or epideictic (concerned with praise and blame, primarily involving the present). But to be effective in any of these kinds, one must appeal to the opinions of one's audience—hence the lists of "topics" reviewing such opinions. First he considers the components of happiness, on the grounds that all men aim at happiness, hence this topic figures in all persuasion and dissuasion. For deliberative oratory specifically, he lists the topics naming men's opinions as to the good, the expedient, and their opposites (along with relevant observations on different forms of government). His topics for epideictic, dealing with praise and blame, comprise the things men consider virtuous and vicious. And his list of forensic topics has to do with the motives and effects of just and unjust acts. Also, there are such general topics as the possible and impossible, the more and the less, the likely and the unlikely.Enthymemes (deductions based on opinion) fit well with forensic, he says. Rhetorical induction (example) best suits the deliberative. And to epideictic, amplification (auxesis... (shrink)

Richard McKeon was a philosopher of extraordinary creativity who brought profoundly original ideas to bear on more standard ways of thinking and learning. A classicist, medievalist, and revolutionary intellectual, he fashioned an approach to philosophy as a plural conversation among varied traditions of thought, epochs, and civilizations. This second volume of McKeon's selected works demonstrates his approach to inquiry and practice in culture, education, and the arts. Together, the writings in this book show how McKeon reinvented the ancient arts of (...) rhetoric, grammar, logic, and dialectic for the new circumstances of a global culture. In essays on creation and criticism, for instance, rhetoric is distinguished from grammar and shown to be the master art of invention, judgment, and pluralistic interpretation. Writings on themes of culture, meanwhile, explore the self-invention of mankind as justification for the arts, the development of the humanities, and the organization of the sciences. In the closing essays on education and philosophy, McKeon considers the implications of his ideas for the future of the liberal arts and higher learning. (shrink)

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 320pp. pbk. $19.95 ISBN-13: 978-0816666119. In Games of Empire , Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter expand an earlier study of “the video game industry as an aspect of an emerging postindustrial, post-Fordist capitalism” (xxix) to argue that videogames are “exemplary media of Empire” (xxix). Their notion of “Empire” is based on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), which (...) characterizes the contemporary world order as a decentralized system of global economic, political, and economic power that transcends national boundaries. In the view of the authors, Hardt and Negri’s account sets itself apart from other analyses of international politics by offering a “comprehensive account of conditions of work, forms of subjectivity, and types of struggle in contemporary capital” (xx). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter thus divide Games of Empire into three sections to reflect each of these aspects of Empire ’s argument, seeing their work as the first account to explore “virtual games within a system of global ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations, and radical struggle” (xxix). Books in the University of Minnesota Press’s Electronic Mediations series “explore the humanistic and social implications” of new technologies that spark “significant changes in society and culture, politics and economics, thinking and being.” That’s an abstract goal, and one that Games of Empire surely meets. Yet at times it can be difficult to understand exactly which specific intervention this book seeks to make. It is unclear whether the authors of Games of Empire see their work as an indictment of game scholars’ lack of attention to political economy, or whether it’s a work of political theory hoping to show that other disciplines should be paying more attention to the production and play of videogames. Because Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter don’t directly criticize previous political critiques of gaming—such as Edward Castronova’s exploration of the “porous membrane” allowing two-way traffic between virtual economies and those of the real world, or Alexander Galloway’s unraveling of control protocols in algorithmic design, or Ian Bogost’s idea of political procedural rhetoric—they sometimes leave the reader wondering how to situate the book in the broader discourse on games and politics, either separately or together. Thus, Games of Empire might best be seen as an introduction to the writings of Hardt and Negri for game players and designers, rather than as a text for communicating the basic concepts of game studies and design. It is neither a truly new theory of games or digital media, nor is it a new theory of Empire—and that’s not a criticism. It is instead an introduction to Empire through popular culture, as Zizek does for Lacan in Looking Awry . If one were teaching an introductory course on contemporary political theory, this book would offer obvious inroads into Negri and Hardt’s thinking for a number of reasons. Despite its radical ideological bent, the book isn’t off-putting to readers who don’t necessarily share the authors’ politics. It synthesizes complex ideas from difficult thinkers like Marx, Foucault, and Guattari while integrating modifications and critiques of Empire theory itself. And although the book is dense, sometimes feeling longer than it actually is (just over 200 pages), Games of Empire maintains a breezy readability by tightly coupling core concepts of Empire theory to well-known games and widely-publicized conflicts within the videogame industry. The first section of the book focuses on immaterial labor, the accumulation of “cognitive capital,” and the global process of manufacturing videogame consoles. It is significant for the authors that videogames began as hacker experiments within research institutes of the military industrial complex, programmed on stolen time, before becoming a commodity (7). This is the first in a string of examples showing how creative dissidence and conflict fuel the continuing evolution of Empire’s control. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter explain that the videogame industry now constitutes an international production apparatus dominating both creative work in developed nations and manual labor in developing ones. Because game industries in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan are predominately non-unionized, they serve as an exemplary system for analyzing how global capital exploits contemporary intellectual work—including an excellent analysis of the “EA Spouse” scandal of 2004. On the side of the consumer, the authors argue that rabid “console races” that drive the industry forward from a technological perspective serve to structure gamer identity and combat piracy; later in the book, these machines offer a window into the worlds of Congolese coltan mining and electronic waste (222-224). In the second section, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter move on to deep case studies of individual games to show how the most popular game genres embed imperial assumptions about conflict, exchange, and urban life. First they argue that military training games such as Full Spectrum Warrior —co-developed by university researchers, industry developers, and military contractors—contribute to the “banalization” of war, a subjective state wherein perpetual preparedness for war is accepted as a part of everyday life (100). Chapter five covers Michel Foucalt’s notion of “biopower,” the extension of capital accumulation to life itself. The authors argue that virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft , which take market capitalism as a given and force players into essentialist roles and racial antagonisms, are organized to maximize control and profit (often on the backs of virtual currency “farmers” in China and southeast Asia). Finally, they criticize the naïve assumption that humor and cynicism in the popular sandbox game franchise Grand Theft Auto offer any remedy to its racialized, violent content. Instead, such games indulge and normalize the fantasy of getting rich at any cost by keeping the realities of contemporary urban life and corporate greed at a safe distance (181). Part three of Games of Empire focuses on “games of multitude,” a preliminary attempt to escape from Empire’s order through alternate modes of videogame development and play. Multitude is defined dialectically, as “the engine and the enemy” of Empire (187). This is the most important, yet also most contradictory section of the text. It lays bare the process by which Empire and its media feed our creative and intellectual development to overabundance. At a certain point, the force of the multitude reaches such a level that it threatens the stability of Empire; however, instead of following Hardt and Negri’s utopian assumptions about the radical potential of the multitude, the authors here follow Paolo Virno’s warning that Empire is “very good at adopting apparently iconoclastic practices and utopian ideas as management techniques and revenue sources” (188). At every turn, advances in player configurative power provide new sources of revenue and advertising angles for the game industry. A disappointing shortcoming of these latter pages is the lack of truly new examples for radical resistance within game development. Instead, it turns out that the radical left seems satisfied with the same mild successes that the left-of-center also has celebrated: artist’s mods, virtual world activism, and critical counterplay within strategy- and wargames. Having been frequently cited by many authors before Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, this idea of subversion or resistance through play feels tired and unpersuasive. It is unclear if the authors believe it is possible to embrace game design itself as a way of pursuing what they call “exodus” from Empire, or if an all-too-fashionable subversion is the only workable strategy. While the book does explore how the earliest independent game studios were eventually subverted and incorporated into the game industry proper, it doesn’t affirm or critique more recent non-commercial, DIY game development projects such as Klik-of-the-Month Club and Ludum Dare. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s analysis of so-called “tactical games,” including the editorial works of La Molleindustria, leads to an even more ambivalent take on the contemporary design ecology. At the conclusion of his essay on “Countergaming,” Galloway asserts that avant-garde videogame artists “should create new grammars of action […] should create alternative algorithms” (Galloway 125). Yet Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter characterize works such as McDonald’s Video Game and Oiligarchy as didactic, suggesting that the role of radical political games might be “limited to that of agitprop” (199). They are concerned that games like those of Molleindustria rigidly structure the activities of their players in order to prove a point. Yet, despite their repeated assertion that the equation of greater interactivity with democratic digital liberation is flawed, the authors see potential in policy simulators that “allow players to edit or tweak” (202) their parameters in response to what Bogost has called simulation fever , the simultaneous drive toward and fear of simulation (Bogost 108). The possibility of practicing radical design is bucked, and early attempts at critical game development like those of Molleindustria’s seem to be relegated to the status of exceptions that prove the rule for player-centered exodus. Overall, there is one glaring question Games of Empire leaves unanswered: how exactly are videogames the “exemplary media” of Empire, and what are the implications of videogames being exemplary in this way? Presumably Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter want to avoid essentialist claims, so they’re not keen on following Wark’s desire to mark “the game’s difference from [legacy media] as something that speaks to changes in the overall structure of social and technical relations” (Wark 225). It is also unclear how the production apparatuses, labor standards, and subjectivizing processes involved in the creation and use of other any other kind of digital media would fail to justify their equally exemplary status. Even the book’s concluding paragraph holds that virtual games “are one molecular component of this undecidable collective mutation” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 229) of intellect, labor, and daily life. In the end, the authors seem to back away from their focus on games as exemplary to bring their work in line with broader theories of the gradual digitization of the everyday, in line with Galloway and Manovich. Despite these flaws, there is an undeniable elegance to Games of Empire ’s contrasting of gaming’s overwhelmingly imperial content with its multitudinous form . And its ambivalence about the potential of independent or political game development might be seen by scholars of Empire as a strength rather than a weakness, an acceptance that every new expression of multitude offers another opportunity for the expansion of Empire. The book also functions as a strong, all-encompassing call to greater responsibility on the part of mainstream game developers to be more conscious of the ideologies they embed in their work, of the way their intellectual property is used and manipulated by those who employ them, and of the material impact their industry has on the world at large. For players it offers a toolbox of concepts for radical examinations of their own play activities, asking them to be more cognizant of the consequences of their consumption of digital media and the ways in which their virtual lives interface with the real. REFERENCES Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Castranova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games . Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Dyer-Witheford, Nick and de Peuter, Greig. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 377 Parmenides: Being, Bounds, and Logic. By S. AUSTIN. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Pp. xi + 203. $20.00. Within carefully drawn limits Austin conducts a rigorous analysis of Parmenides's poem that is both creative and forceful. His analysis reveals a logical structure to the poem that is more intricate and subtle than has previously been acknowledged. The result is a deeper insight into Parmenides (...) 's accomplishments in logic and methodology. Austin's view is that Parmenides first establishes criteria for the formation of judgments, and then uses a consciously systematic and comprehensive method to determine the sort of judgments that can describe being. Thus, Austin argues, all the arguments and distinctions of the " Truth " section-and to some extent those of " Opinion "-are necessary for a complete description of being. The argumentation is rigorous and Austin's thesis is certainly plausible, though some modifications are in order. The charge of anachronism presents the most fundamental challenge to Austin's thesis. For him, Parmenides is not only the "first logician" and " ontologist ", but the " founder of Western rational theology as well as of scientific explanation." These accolades are commonplace, but nonethe less misleading. More serious is Austin's claim that Parmenides employs the principles of noncontradiction and excluded middle, and displays an understanding-albeit a partial one-of the functions of negation, double negation, copula and predicate. Austin sees countless anticipations of Parmenides's successors from Plato to the present, and has no qualms about rendering parts of the poem in contemporary philosophical jargon. For example, the phrase "not the same" in fr. 8.22 should, on Austin's reading, be taken to mean, " having its numerical nonidentity secured by means of qualitative difference" (p. 88). Austin recognizes the charge of anachronism, but believes his interpretation best accounts for the poem's logical structure. More specific anticipations of Plato and Aristotle are tackled in chapter 5. Chapter 1 ("Why Not 'Is Not'~") contains an ingenious solution to a problem that has puzzled scholars and students alike for centuries. The goddess of Parmenides's poem proclaims (fr. 2) : "that it is not and that it is right for it not to be, this I point out to you as a completely uninformative track." Why, then, do nearly all the signposts of being in fr. 8 use negative language and indirect prooH This problem, Austin suggests, has not been sufficiently appreciated. Austin shows forcefully that no interpretation of fr. 8 can stand which explains away the goddess 's use of negative language. Austin's own explanation results from careful scrutiny of the grammar of predications and assertions in fr. 8. Curiously, of all the negative expressions in fr. 8, the expression ovK e. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Paradox of Kandinsky's Abstract RepresentationKenneth BerryThere is a paradox in the relationship between Kandinsky's use of the terms, "abstract" and "concrete," which is presented in the expression, "Kandinsky's abstract representation." Thisexpression, while being apparently contradictory, may point to a feature underpinning Kandinsky's art, which is pivotal to a proper experience of his work, just as, in Christopher Middleton's view, a poetic language may be pivotal to the formation (...) of cultures.1 Art and cultural artifacts are vital to aesthetic experience and aesthetic education, and both the language of art and other languages are instrumental to this end. However, how may Kandinsky's mature abstraction, being in essence objectless, have any claim to representation, and consequently the higher cultural goals of aesthetic expression and the aesthetic enrichment of society?According to Thomas M. Messer, the position of centrality that Kandinsky has assumed in our understanding of modern art is largely due to his having brought to bear on his art, an instinctive awareness of what constituted the central aesthetic issues of his era.2 Kandinsky's writings in Concerning the Spiritual in Art elaborate on his aesthetic theories, and, in particular, [End Page 99] present the view that paintings should be looked at as a graphic representation of a mood rather than as a representation of objects. Messer observes that, for Kandinsky, abstraction, defined as a mode of painting extending beyond the depiction of recognizable objects, having gradually stripped itself of mimetic vestiges, thus becomes paramount. Michael Carter has similarly pointed out that with the pure forms of absolute abstraction, the non-objective colors and shapes of Kandinsky's paintings were regarded as distillations of the aesthetic properties of the artistic sign3 — separable from any referential aspect of art.4 This aesthetic aspect of Kandinsky's work, which became known as nonfigurative, nonobjective, or nonrepresentational,goes along with the cultural — and, as sculptor Anish Kapoor has remarked, "in the deepest, deepest depths of human history the cultural has always been a motivator of people," and has the power to transform society through finding visual equivalents for an emotional language.5Much has been written about Kandinsky's use of color, but perhaps the primary innovation that he made, as in the case of Barnett Newman, was in the field of drawing. Kandinsky was influenced by Gauguin's idea that drawing was an abstraction from memory after nature, just as Gauguin had been affected by the simplified contours and flattened forms of Puvis de Chavannes. Drawing did not come so easily to Kandinsky as color — he had to work harder at drawing, but in his early improvisations, forms and their outlines as graphic symbols came welling up from the unconscious, and eidetic motifs only had to be copied — almost as the art of calligraphy. Kandinsky's "organic" drawing developed as an urge to nonnaturalistic impulses, and during the period of Point and Line to Plane became almost a grammar of form, saved from mere pedantry by the living forces or visual tensions that made various kinds of line operate not just as contours but as dynamic or restful elements within themselves. In 1913, Kandinsky wrote in his "Reminiscences" that, "painting is a thundering collision of different worlds, intended to create a new world in, and from, their struggles with one another, a new world which is the work of art."6 It is clear from this that the Modernist work of art was intended to be a "new world" operating according to its own universal aesthetic laws.Kandinsky is not just a painter; he is also a visual poet. Poetry, according to Tony Curtis, involves the expression of the intensification of experience — the elevation of banal facts of life into something beyond the merely prosaic — something unique and perceptively heightened.7 It involves both imagination and poetic license to explore both ambiguity and paradox. As Scottish poet Norman MacCaig observed, poetry renders the ordinary extraordinary, seeing the unfamiliar in the familiar.8 Creative analogical thinking such as evinced in Kandinsky's art, often involves breaking free of a clichéd representation.Malcolm Budd has remarked that, in its most exclusive sense, a work... (shrink)

To Peirce scholars and other aficionados of logic, semiotics, and pragmatism, 2017 brought the great news of Bellucci’s Speculative Grammar book, providing the eye-opening first detailed chronological overview over Peirce’s career-length developing of his semiotics. Now, the first volume of Ahti Pietarinen’s long-awaited three-volume publication of the totality of Peirce’s writings on his mature logic representation system known as Existential Graphs not only gives us a plethora of hitherto unpublished Peirce papers but also a new and in many ways (...) surprising view into the origin and development of this important fruit of Peirce’s last, creative philosophical burst taking its beginning around 1896, famously to... (shrink)

This essay develops a theory of improvisation as practice of aesthetic sense-making. While considering all arts, references are made to many concrete cases. A topic in vogue since the XX. century, as evidenced by the great philosophers who were interested in it (Ryle, Derrida, Eco among others), improvisation, a felicitous mixture of habit and creativity, norm and freedom, is constitutive of human action. Human practices – including very well-regulated activities such as playing chess, piloting airplanes, or medicine – permit and (...) often require it to varying degrees. Improvisation is also the true source of artistic experience. Consequently, the aesthetics of improvisation result in a philosophy of art: Art was born as improvisation. Yet improvisation has its own aesthetic dimension: that of a "grammar of contingency" in which notions such as emergence, presence, curiosity and authenticity explain the pleasures of joyful adventure and empathic involvement elicited by improvisation. (shrink)

In philosophical circles, but not only there, Chomsky's views on natural language regularly fall a prey to misrepresentation. Very often the confusion involves the creative aspect of language use, an aspect of linguistic performance, which tends to be confounded with the notion recursivity, a property of the grammatical competence system. The present article clears away the most deep-seated confusions and proves that criticism of generative grammar based upon them cannot be upheld. In particular, it shows that the existence (...) of metaphors, and deviations from rules more generally, reinforces rather than refutes Chomsky's theory so long as the crucial distinction between knowledge of language (competence) and language use (performance) is taken heed of. It is argued that theories which deny this distinction and view human language as a set of dispositions or as an ability are misguided. The final section illustrates some properties of Universal Grammar (UG) by means of data from the domain of negative polarity and subject-object asymmetries. Though these phenomena are far from being fully understood, the present level of our insight warrants the conclusion that they lend considerable support to the Chomskyan conception of UG as a highly complex and richly articulated linguistic genotype. (shrink)

A metaphor that has dominated linguistics for the entire duration of its existence as a discipline views sentences as edifices consisting of Lego-like building blocks. It is assumed that each sentence is constructed (and, on the receiving end, parsed) ab novo, starting (ending) with atomic constituents, to logical semantic specifications, in a recursive process governed by a few precise algebraic rules. The assumptions underlying the Lego metaphor, as it is expressed in generative grammar theories, are: (1) perfect regularity of (...) what Saussure called langue, (2) infinite potential recursivity of syntactic structures, (3) unlimited human capacity for linguistic creativity, (4) the impossibility of acquiring structural knowledge from examples, and (5) the impossibility of such knowledge being stored in a memory-intensive form (ensembles of exemplars). (shrink)

Preface --Part I: What is excellence? -- The making of a new meaning of excellence -- The making of a concept -- Divine imitation and excellence -- Excellence and subject -- Infinite longing -- A view of human nature -- Self-world correlation and excellence -- Exegeting excellence -- The grammar of excellence -- Excellence : technical and ontological -- Excellence as will-to-the-infinite -- Excellence as community of abstract-concrete and more -- Problematic standards of excellence -- Excellence and creativity -- (...) The core features of excellence -- An African conception of excellence -- New being : the construction of excellent self -- Conclusion: The features of excellence -- New being : participation and imitation -- Christology of excellence -- Imitation in Christian theology -- Justice, love and hope -- Excellence and justice -- Excellence and love -- Excellence and hope -- Part II: Social ethical framework -- A framework for social ethics -- Tillich's concept of ethics -- Creativity and theonomous ethics -- Governance and prophetic spirit -- A model of an excellentist social world -- Outline of governance ethics -- Excellence and the prophetic spirit -- The prophetic spirit and the law -- Social practice as boundary of possibilities -- Social practice : the tension between included and excluded possibilities -- The myth of goods : internal versus external -- Excellence and economic development -- The theological character of economic development -- Modeling excellence on factors of economic development -- Excellence and money -- Economic development : the role of work and monetary policy -- The good, truth, and beauty -- The depth and destiny of excellence -- The exit and tag line : Africa and excellence. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the study of the etymology and semantic connotations of Sanskrit terms: sat, bhāva, sambhava, bhavitṛ, bhavya, bhavat, bhūti, bhūta, sarvabhūta, bhavaka, sattva, sattā, saṃvṛtti, jāstāmātā sampatti, vartamāna, āvitta, āvinna as lexical representatives of the conceptosphere of being in the Sanskrit-English dictionary of Monier-Williams. The method of conceptual analysis is implemented based on the assumption of the determining influence of language culture on the content and nature of philosophical creativity. This study is only the first stage (...) of the project to reveal the way of interpreting "being" in the history of Indian philosophy. The key semantic connotations of this concept in the Monier-Williams English-Sanskrit dictionary are revealed. The semantic connection of the concept of "being" with the concepts: "life" and "time" is defined. In this context, "to live" is to be "someone" in order to embrace "one's place" and play "one's role" that can provide "possession" for "subsistence", and the relationship between "being" and "time" is the concreteness of the existing event that is happening or has happened and belonging to the future that is about to happen. Although we do not trace a transparent connection between the concepts of "being" and "space" in Sanskrit, there are reasons to believe that the first of all, the etymology of the terms of our chosen conceptosphere clearly presents the interpretation of being as a long and a spatially defined location. Noticeable is the fact that the connection between the interpretation of the concept of "being" in Sanskrit and the ethical concept of "good" and aesthetic "beauty" we trace only in terms derived from as and bhū, and at the same time only the terms sat and bhava can be translated as "truth", and the meaning of "essence" we find only in the translation of the terms sat and sattva. This explains the fact why the term sat is considered as close as possible to the "Western" interpretation of the concept of "being". It has been suggested that the polysemy of lexical representatives of the concept of being in Sanskrit and the complexity and variability of the grammar compliance of this language can be interpreted as an obstacle to the extreme problematization of this concept. (shrink)

This volume offers a systematic philosophical analysis of the normative challenges facing European refugee policy, focusing on whether the response to it can be based on European values. By considering the refugee policy through the lens of European values, cosmopolitan norms and universal human rights, the contributions expose the weaknesses and limitations of existing regulations and make proposals on how to improve them. The EU is often seen as a cosmopolitan project. Europe is supposed to be a community of states (...) that aspires to be guided by cosmopolitan norms. However, the idea of a cosmopolitan Europe has never been unanimously shared, and in recent years, it has come under increasing scrutiny, particularly with regard to the EU’s refugee policy. The guiding idea of this book is that a deeper philosophical understanding of the normative issues at stake can foster greater conceptual clarity and enrich political debates on the future of European refugee policy. The first part of the book revolves around the question of whether the rise in refugee numbers over the past decade has led to a crisis in the EU and, if so, how this crisis relates to or impacts European values. The second part traces the history of the discourse on “European values” and examines from a philosophical perspective how we can plausibly understand these values in terms of their moral grammar, their normative content and their implications for the behaviour of the EU and its member states. Finally, the third part puts forth recommendations for a feasible and normatively more compelling European refugee policy based on human rights, human dignity, justice and democratic self-determination as the decisive normative requirements. Cosmopolitan Norms and European Values: Ethical Perspectives on Europe’s Refugee Policy will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in ethics, political philosophy, political science, social sciences and law. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to extend the Realist account of the foundations of linguistics offered by Postal, Katz and others. I first argue against the idea that naive Platonism can capture the necessary requirements on what I call a ‘mixed realist’ view of linguistics, which takes aspects of Platonism, Nominalism and Mentalism into consideration. I then advocate three desiderata for an appropriate ‘mixed realist’ account of linguistic ontology and foundations, namely (1) linguistic creativity and infinity, (2) linguistics as (...) a theory of types (and not tokens) and (3) independence but structural respect between language and the linguistic competence thereof. My own brand of mixed realism, what I call ante rem realism, is defended along the lines of an ante rem or non-eliminative structuralism, the likes of which has been offered for mathematics by Resnik (1997) and Shapiro (1997). In other words, grammars describe a mind-independent (but not necessarily unconnected) linguistic reality in terms of linguistic patterns or structures also known as natural languages. I further amend this picture to allow for the possibility of a naturalistic account of language acquisition and evolution by arguing against a particular view of the type-token distinction. (shrink)

The primary goal of modern linguistic theory (at least in the circles I inhabit) is an explanation of the human language capacity and how it enables the child to acquire adult competence in language.1 Adult competence in turn is understood as the ability (or knowledge) to creatively map between sound and meaning, using a rich combinatorial system – the lexicon and grammar of the language. An adequate theory must satisfy at least three crucial constraints, which I will call the (...) Descriptive Constraint, the Learnability Constraint, and the Evolutionary Constraint. (shrink)

Within the context of Carruthers’ general analysis of the relation between language and thought, I present a specific hypothesis about how grammar uses perspective flow to unify disparate cognitions. This perspective hypothesis allows us to understand the neolithic burst in creativity as a cultural advance in methods for knitting together thoughts.

There has been a long-standing controversy in the context of language evolution on whether the original function of human language was internal thought or external communication. However, given the fact that language clearly serves both functions, internalization and externalization must have been co-evolutionarily acted in the emergence of human language. This article proposes a theoretical hypothesis about this co-evolutionary relationship of internalization and externalization, which especially explains the emergence of the human lexicon. To discuss the evolution of language from a (...) comprehensive perspective, this article proposes a promising model that integrates two approaches with different standpoints: generative grammar and cognitive linguistics. This paper also examines the definition and nature of the lexicon and lexical items based on this integrated model. The hypothesis presented here demonstrates that the co-evolutionary work of internalization and externalization has been involved in two processes in the development of the lexicon: the establishment of syntactic objects (lexical items) and the improvement of creativity responsible for the expansion of lexicon size. The main conclusion is that these processes have formed a positive feedback loop and provided our lexicon with complex and unique properties. (shrink)

The later Wittgenstein famously holds that an understanding which tries to run up against the limits of language bumps itself and results in nothing but plain nonsense. Therefore, the task of philosophy cannot be to create an ‘ideal’ language so as to produce a ‘real’ understanding in the first place; its aim must be to remove particular misunderstandings by clarifying the use of our ordinary language. Accordingly, Wittgenstein opposes both the sublime terms of traditional philosophy and the formal frameworks of (...) modern logics---and adheres to a pointedly casual, colloquial style in his own philosophizing. However, there seems to lurk a certain inconsistency in Wittgenstein’s ordinary language approach: his philosophical remarks frequently remain enigmatic, and many of the terms Wittgenstein coins appear to be highly technical. Thus, one might wonder whether his verdicts on the limits of language and on philosophical jargons might not be turned against his own practice. The present essay probes the extent to which the contravening tendencies in Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy might be reconciled. Section 2 sketches Wittgenstein’s general approach to philosophy and tracks the special role that the language of everyday life occupies therein. Section 3 reconstructs Wittgenstein’s preferred method for philosophy, which he calls perspicuous representation, and argues that this method implements an aesthetic conception of philosophy and a poetic approach to philosophical language, in which philosophical insights are not explicitly stated, but mediated through well-worded and creatively composed descriptions. Section 4 discusses how Wittgenstein’s philosophical poetics relates to artificial terminologies and grammars in philosophy and science. (shrink)