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- Lecture 5: Black Magic & Proto-Linguistics & Kabbalism
- Lecture 6: Mono-Geneticism, Universal Characters, Dante & Lull
- Lecture 7: A Priori Philosophical Languages & Leibniz
- Lecture 8: International Auxiliary Languages
- Lecture 9: Conclusion to Search for the Perfect Language
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- Immanuel Kant
- We don’t understand objects as they exist apart from perception.
- The human mind is the active originator of experience.
- Rationalism
- Aristotle
- René Descartes – Cartesianism
- Gottfried von Leibniz – thought that the world is knowable a priori,
through an analysis of ideas and derivations done through logic.
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- Gottfried W. Leibniz: Human knowledge is innate and does not depend on
experience for its confirmation.
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- David Hume: Hume denies the possibility of knowledge through reason,
since reason cannot operate without ideas, and ideas all are only
acquired through the senses.
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- 3 Main Sections:
- The Objective Deduction
- The Transcendental Deduction
- The Subjective Deduction
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- What are the presuppositions of experience?
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- A priori knowledge exists:
- The existence of a priori knowledge follows, not from the fact that we
have this or that experience, but from the fact that we have experience
at all. Therefore, it depends
upon no particular experience for its verification, and can be established
by reasoning alone. It will be
true in every comprehensible world.
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- The transcendental deduction results in “knowledge which is occupied not
so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so
far as this mode of knowledge is possible a priori” (Critique of Pure
Reason, 2nd Ed.: 25).
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- Objective Deduction + Transcendental Deduction è The world is as we think it, and we think it as it is.
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- Faculty of Intuition: this includes all the sensory states and
modifications that empiricists think to be the sole basis of knowledge.
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- Faculty of Concepts: the Empiricists say that concepts are relicts of
sensations; Kants says that this is a mistake, because concepts have to
be applied in judgements. The
corresponding mistake of Rationalism is to think of sensation as a kind
of confused aspiration towards conceptual thought.
- “Leibniz intellectualized appearances, just as Locke … sensualized the
concepts of the understanding” (Critique of Pure Reason, 1st
Ed.:271).
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- Judgement = Concept + Intuition è which generate Experience
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- Experience contains a concept (which comes from cognition), and can
provide the grounds for the application of a concept.
- Sensation (intuition) contains no concept, and does not provide the
grounds for judgment. Until
transformed by mental activity, all sensation is without intellectual
structure and, therefore, provides no grounds for belief.
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- The Genesis of Linguistics
- From Adam to Confusio Linguarum
- The Kabbalistic Pansemioticism
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- God commands Adam to call the animals ‘by their own names.’
- Is this naming intrinsic or arbitrary?
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- Language precedes creation and is the active element in creation.
- The structure of the universe relies on the structure of language.
- Presupposes the existence of Universal Sememes
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- The universe is separate from language (tenet of Saussure, among
others).
- Derrida, deconstruction, postmodernism
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- Greek & Latin thought: a chaotic, orderless universe that is
organized and given meaning by the gods.
- The idea that language has order (i.e. structure) is presently
emphasized in linguistics.
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- Were interested in the parts of language: phonemes, morphemes, and
words.
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- “In the Cratylus, Plato asks the same question that a reader of the
Genesis story might: did the nomethete choose sounds with which to name
objects according to the objects’ nature (physis)? This is the thesis of
Cratylus, while Ermogene maintains that they were assigned by law or
human convention (nomos)” (SFPL 11).
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- Language is conventional – it refers to things because we choose to
designate objects a certain way.
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- It would use the nature of things to refer to those things and thus
overcome arbitrariness, ambiguity.
- The perfect language = the primal language that existed before the
Tower, though some argued that there is more than one perfect language.
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- Hebrew
- Greek
- Latin
- Sanskrit
- Chinese
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- /dag/ is not related to /dak/
- 2 similar things in the universe may sound very different.
- 2 very different things in the universe may sound similar.
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- One division of universe and sound
- Library Catalogs
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- Notariqon = acrostics used to decipher a hidden message
- Gematria = words given # values in Hebrew
- Temurah = anagrams or recombination of letters
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- Kabbala of the Names (Ecstatic Kabbala)
- “For Abulafia, each letter, each atomic element, already had a meaning
of its own, independent of the meaning of the syntagms in which it
occurred. Each letter was already
a divine name.”
- Moved the Kabbala art further than anyone else
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