Language and the World: Essays New and Old

Richard L Epstein

Jul 2021 · Advanced Reasoning Forum

About this ebook

This book presents a new perspective on ways we encounter the world with our languages. There are two kinds of languages. Some direct speakers to encounter the world as made up of things. Others direct speakers to encounter the world as the flow of all with no idea of change, for there is no thing to change, only differing descriptions of the flow. The essays by Richard L. Epstein set out this division of languages and explore its significance for linguistics, metaphysics, thought, meaning, logic, and ethics. The other essays, by Dorothy Lee, Benjamin Lee Whorf, M. Dale Kinkade, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Benson Mates, extend, or contradict, or support those ideas, leading to a large view of how we talk and understand, and how that affects how we live.

About the author

Richard L. Epstein (1947–) received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. He began studies in philosophy as a postdoctoral fellow at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His mentors in philosophy were George Hughes and Benson Mates. He has published books on mathematical logic, formal logic, logic as the art of reasoning well, and linguistics. He has translated and edited for publication the stories in The BARK of DOG. He is now Head of the Advanced Reasoning Forum and director of The BARK of DOG Foundation in Socorro, New Mexico.