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What Kind of Creatures Are We?

Noam Chomsky

Hardcover | Pages: 200 pages

Rating: 3.75 | 607 Users | 79 Reviews

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ISBN:

0231175965 (ISBN13: 9780231175968)

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

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

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Title	:	What Kind of Creatures Are We?
Author	:	Noam Chomsky
Book Format	:	Hardcover
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 200 pages
Published	:	December 15th 2015 by Columbia University Press
Categories	:	Philosophy. Nonfiction. Humanities. Linguistics. Science. Politics. Psychology

Rating About Books What Kind of Creatures Are We?

Ratings: 3.75 From 607 Users | 79 Reviews

Evaluation About Books What Kind of Creatures Are We?

I haphazardly stumbled upon this this book and, having never read any Chomsky yet always being curious to engage, rather impulsively picked up this book. From the description on the back cover I assumed it would be as good as any to venture into the writings and ideas of, as I came to affectionately call him in my mind, Ol Chompers. Almost immediately I realized this is not an impulsive book to pick up. First off, its a transcription of his recent lectures and so, Chomskys original/intended

This is a very interesting book but rough in style and a bit repetitive. It consists of four essays: What is language?, What can we understand?, What is the common good? and The mysteries of nature: How deeply hidden?. Not easy to read and to understand. One needs to be constantly fully concentrating while reading. In addition, the book has a lot of acronyms and linguistic terms that many readers may not be familiar with. The key point in the first essay that language is about thought and only

A short book based on Chomsky's lectures at Columbia, composed in his usual boring* style, a deceptively simple summa of his work on language, science and society. I've been reading Chomsky's books since the 1970s. This is my favorite.If you haven't read Chomsky before, this is probably not the best place to start.** According to Kirkus Reviews, "The writing is academic in its tenor, referencing throughout the work of philosophical luminaries such as David Hume, John Locke, Joseph Priestley, and

The four sections of this book are taken from a series of lectures at Columbia and as a result are academic in nature. Some readers who may not be as familiar with the philosophy of science or linguistics may understandability get a bit lost, so Ive tried to break down the arguments point-by-point and I offered my own key takeaways at the end. What is language?1. The defining feature of human nature is our creative use of language. As Humboldt noted, The infinite use of finite means.2.The Basic

A relatively succinct, but by no means dumbed down, overview of Chomsky's view on linguistics, cognition, politics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Only one chapter is on politics, so exclusive fans of Chomsky's politics may not enjoy this one as much. I'm particularly interested in his famous distinction between problems (that we are cognitively equipped to solve) and mysteries (that remain beyond our ken), which he applies to the history of early modern European philosophy in

although majority of the lingo looped my head, moments of clarity were enriching

It is a bit mind-boggling how someone can be so well read in such a wide area of subjects. In this book, or perhaps lecture, Chomsky tries to draw the threads together from language, over evolutionary biology to society and it is a very interesting read. Not least interesting is his inclusion of the stomach as an additional brain. The difference from the brain is that we are not conscious about the activity of the stomach. I am leaning more and more towards some type of understanding of our