Tran Duc Thao, a wise and learned scientist and an eminent Marxist philoso pher, begins this treatise on the origins of language and consciousness with a question: "One of the principal difficulties of the problem of the origin of consciousness is the exact determination of its beginnings. Precisely where must one draw the line between the sensori-motor psychism of animals and the conscious psychism that we see developing in man?" And then he cites Karl Marx's famous passage about 'the bee and the architect' from Capital: ... what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in the imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. (Capital, Vol. I, p. 178, tr. Moore and Aveling) Thao follows this immediately with a second question: "But is this the most elementary form of consciousness?" Thus the conundrum concerning the origins of consciousness is posed as a circle: if human consciousness pre supposes representation (of the external reality, of mental awareness, of actions, of what it may), and if this consciousness emerges first with the activity of production using tools, and if the production of tools itself pre supposes representation - that is, with an image of what is to be produced in the mind of the producer - then the conditions for the origins of human

Tran Duc Thao, a brilliant student of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Super- ieure within the post-1935 decade of political disaster, born in Vietnam shortly after the F ir st World War, recipient of a scholarship in Paris in 1935 37, was early noted for his independent and originaI mind_ While the 1930s twisted down to the defeat of the Spanish Republic, the compromise with German Fascism at Munich, and the start of the Second World War, and while the 1940s began with hypocritical stability at the Western Front fol- lowed by the defeat of France, and the occupation of Paris by the German power together with French collaborators, and the n ended with liberation and a search for a new understanding of human situations, the young Thao was deeply immersed in the classical works of European philosophy. He was al so the attentive but critical student of a quite special generation of French metaphysicians and social philosophers: Gaston Berger, Maurice Merleau- Ponty, Emile Brehier, Henri Lefebvre, Rene le Senne, Jean-Paul Sartre, perhaps the young Louis Althusser. They, in their several modes of response, had been meditating for more than a decade on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, which came to France in the thirties as a new metaphysical enlighten- ment - phenomenology.

Among modern philosophers, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) has few rivals for his influence over the development of contemporary philosophy as a whole. While the issue of language has become a key fulcrum of continental philosophy since the twentieth century, Kant has been overlooked as a thinker whose breadth of insight has helped to spearhead this advance. The Linguistic Dimension of Kant’s Thought remedies this historical gap by gathering new essays by distinguished Kant scholars. The chapters examine the many ways that Kant’s philosophy addresses the nature of language. Although language as a formal structure of thought and expression has always been part of the philosophical tradition, the “linguistic dimension” of these essays speaks to language more broadly as a practice including communication, exchange, and dialogue.

The question of language origin has fascinated people for years. The contributions in the present book stem primarely from the papers presented at the Third International Meeting of the Language Origins Society (LOS) held at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, June 1988. The contributors approach the problem not only from the viewpoint of linguistics, but also from that of anatomy, physiology, social sciences, physical anthropology, paleoanthropology, paleontology, comparative zoology, general biology, ethology, evolutionary biology and psychology.

This annotated commentary delineating Michel Pêcheux’s materialist discourse theory anticipates the formation of a real social science to supersede the metaphysical meanings ‘always-already-there’ instituted by empirical ideology. Structures of Language presents Pêcheux’s consequential work in respect of Ferdinand de Saussure’s epistemological breakthrough that founded the science of linguistics: the theoretical separation of sound from meaning. Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar, John Searle’s philosophy of language, B. F. Skinner’s indwelling agents, J. L. Austin’s speech situations, Jacques Lacan’s symbolic order, and other influential linguistic researchers, are cited to explain imaginary semantic systems. The broader implications for structural metaphysics in language use are tacitly conveyed.

Take a journey through Jean-Paul Sartre's trans-phenomena of consciousness, into Gilbert Ryle's Linguistic Behaviourism and on to the outer reaches of Wilfrid Sellars' Rylean ancestors and their 'Messianic Behaviourist' Jones. Phenomenology and the Ghost in the Machine begins by investigating a historical connection between Jean-Paul Sartre and Gilbert Ryle. The book exploits this connection to explore an attractive relationship between ordinary language and consciousness, thus providing plenty of chances for readers to learn Sartre's phenomenology and Ryle's linguistic analysis of the mind along the way. This work is a one way ticket to the outer reaches of the mind, arguing that language is insufficient to ground a theory of mind because it fails to capture sublinguistic layers of thought. Only a 'first person science' exploring the nature of mind, and heralded by a return to a Pre-Fregeian Psychologism, can penetrate these mysteries of thought.

The focus of this collective volume is on the mutual determination of language structure, discourse patterns and the accessibility to consciousness of mental contents of different types of organization and complexity. The contributions address the following problems, among others: the history of the interpretation of conscious and unconscious mind in the theoretical discourse of modern linguistics; the determination of the structure of consciousness by the grammatical structure; the levels of access of grammatical and lexical information to consciousness; the development of cognitive complexity and control in ontogeny; pathologies of consciousness access in discourse comprehension and production; the cognitive contextual prerequisites for the representation of meaning in consciousness; the relationships between language structure and qualia in the phenomenology of experience; the dialogical structure of intentionality and meaning representation, etc. (Series B)

The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think has evoked perennial fascination and intense controversy. According to the strong version of this hypothesis, called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after the American linguists who propounded it, languages vary in their semantic partitioning of the world, and the structure of one's language influences how one understands the world. Thus speakers of different languages perceive the world differently. Although the last two decades have been marked by extreme skepticism concerning the possible effects of language on thought, recent theoretical and methodological advances in cognitive science have given the question new life. Research in linguistics and linguistic anthropology has revealed striking differences in cross-linguistic semantic patterns, and cognitive psychology has developed subtle techniques for studying how people represent and remember experience. It is now possible to test predictions about how a given language influences the thinking of its speakers. Language in Mind includes contributions from both skeptics and believers and from a range of fields. It contains work in cognitive psychology, cognitive development, linguistics, anthropology, and animal cognition. The topics discussed include space, number, motion, gender, theory of mind, thematic roles, and the ontological distinction between objects and substances. Contributors Melissa Bowerman, Eve Clark, Jill de Villiers, Peter de Villiers, Giyoo Hatano, Stan Kuczaj, Barbara Landau, Stephen Levinson, John Lucy, Barbara Malt, Dan Slobin, Steven Sloman, Elizabeth Spelke, and Michael Tomasello