This volume contains fourteen essays in which different aspects of gerard Bucher's "thanatopoietic hypothesis" are examined. Initially, five papers (by Wilson Baldridge, Claire Nouvet, Jean-Michel Rabate, Helene Domon and Metka Zupancic) were presented at the International Association for Philosophy and Literature (IAPL), during its 2001 meeting in Atlanta. Subsequently Michel Deguy and Pierre Ouellet, together with Christian Garaud, Kuisma Korhonen, Michael Degener, and Maurizio Godorecci, were invited to explore various implications of Bucher's hypothesis. Bucher's own work, as shown in his contribution to this volume, analyzes the connection between our experience of death and the establishment of poetry as a means of approaching the truth of being, of aestheticism, and of ethics.

The aim of this book is to inform both scholars and the public about the nature and extent of the problem of language decline and death in Africa. It resourcefully traces the main causes and circumstances of language endangerment, the processes and extent of language shift and death, and the consequences of language loss to the continent's rich linguistic and cultural heritage. The book outlines some of the challenges that have emerged out of the situation.

Martin Heidegger was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. His analysis of human existence proves an inexhaustible ground for thinkers of all backgrounds who seek answers for their specific questions left open or opened up by our times. This book explores the intrinsic connection between two fundamentally human traits, language and death. Heidegger addresses each of these traits in depth, without ever explicitly outlining their relationship in a separate theory. However, in a close examination of Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time, Joachim L. Oberst uncovers a connection in three basic steps. Ultimately the author argues that the human invention of language is motivated by the drive towards immortality - language emerges from the experience of mortality as a response to it. This is a refreshing look at one of the most challenging and influential philosophers of our times.

A thorough review of the worldwide problem of language endangerment and death.

Languages are dying at an alarming rate all over the world. Estimates range from 50% to as much as 90% by the end of the century. This collection of original papers tries to strike a balance between theoretical, practical and descriptive approaches to language death and language maintenance. It provides overviews of language endangerment in Africa, Eurasia, and the Greater Pacific Area. It also presents case studies of endangered languages from various language families. These descriptive case studies not only provide data on the degree of endangerment and the causes of language death, but also provide a general sociolinguistic and typological characterization the language(s) under discussion and the prospects of language maintenance (if any). The volume will be of interest to all those concerned with the ongoing extinction of the world’s linguistic diversity.

This volume presents a selection of Hubert Dreyfus's pioneering work in bringing phenomenology and existentialism to bear on the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. Each of the thirteen essays interprets, develops, and extends the insights of his predecessors working in the European philosophical tradition. One of Dreyfus' central contributions to reading the historical canon of philosophy comes from his recognition that great philosophers help us to understand the "background practices" of a culture - the practices that shape and embody our most basic understanding of ourselves and the things and situations we encounter in our world. Background practices are all too often overlooked completely, or else their importance is misunderstood. Each chapter in this volume shows in one way or another how a broad range of philosophical topics can only be properly understood when we recognize how they are grounded in the background practices that shape our lives and give meaning to our activities, our tasks, our normative commitments, our aims and our goals.

Twenty-five languages die each year; at this pace, half the world’s five thousand languages will disappear within the next century. In this timely book, Claude Hagège seeks to make clear the magnitude of the cultural loss represented by the crisis of language death. By focusing on the relationship of language to culture and the world of ideas, Hagège shows how languages are themselves crucial repositories of culture; the traditions, proverbs, and knowledge of our ancestors reside in the language we use. His wide-ranging examination covers all continents and language families to uncover not only how languages die, but also how they can be revitalized—for example in the remarkable case of Hebrew. In a striking metaphor, Hagège likens languages to bonfires of social behavior that leave behind sparks even after they die; from these sparks languages can be rekindled and made to live again.

In Time and Death Carol White articulates a vision of Martin Heidegger's work which grows out of a new understanding of what he was trying to address in his discussion of death. Acknowledging that the discussion of this issue in Heidegger's major work Being and Time is often far from clear, White presents a new interpretation of Heidegger which short-circuits many of the traditional criticisms. White claims that we are all in a better position to understand Heidegger's insights after fifty years because they have now become a part of the conventional wisdom of common opinion. His view shows up in accounts of knowledge in the physical sciences, in the assumptions of the social sciences, in art and film, even in popular culture in general, but does so in ways ignorant of their origins. Now that these insights have filtered down into the culture at large, we can make Heidegger intelligible in a way that perhaps he himself could not. White presents the best possible case for Heidegger, making him more intelligible to those people with a long acquaintance with his work, those with a long aversion to it and in particular to those just starting to pursue an interest in it. White places the problems with which Heidegger is dealing in the context of issues in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, in order to better locate him for the more mainstream audience. The language and approach of the book is able to accommodate the novice but also offers much food for thought for the Heidegger scholar.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.