Tre lezioni sull'uomo

Noam Chomsky is not known as a slouch. And there is nothing slouch-like in this book. But it is limited. That appears to be his answer to the question posed by the title. This brief book consists of four essays: “What is language?”, “What can we understand?”, “What is the common good?” and “The myste Leggi tutto

The first Chomsky I had to put down. I think this piece is meant for PhD linguists who care about super intellectual, nerd impedimenta. With yawning sentences like, "Suppose X and Y are merged, and neither is part of the other, as in combining read with that book to form the syntactic object corresp Leggi tutto

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 Leggi tutto

This is an incredible book as it clarified Chomsky's linguistic project, which can be summed up by asking: what do we expect to discover when language is brought under naturalistic inquiry? What we expect to discover according to Chomsky is a computational procedure that accounts for the Basic Prope Leggi tutto

I read this for a philosophy group and ended up questioning why on earth we had chosen this for discussion. Then I spent time puzzling about why the publishers had thrown this together for the general public. Four areas supposedly brought together to get Chomsky’s take on what kind of creatures we a Leggi tutto

My gut tells me the author slopped together some essays or incomplete thoughts he had over the years, put them together as a slightly incoherent book labeled it as ‘what kind of creature are we’ and loosely tied them together under the rubric on the nature of thought, language, common good, and anth Leggi tutto

When Wilhelm von Humbolt noted that language makes “infinite use of finite means” what he meant was that a limited amount of words can ultimately give rise to an unlimited variety of meanings and expressions. That little kernel of observation lies at the heart of Chomsky's linguistic postulations. E Leggi tutto

I have a couple (couple dozen?) books on my Kindle that I bought on various whims when they were on sale. Another history of World War 1 for just $1.99? Sure! A book on poverty in the United States for $2.99? Why not? A short book purportedly covering the basic ideas of Noam Chomsky for $3.99? I’ve Leggi tutto

Decent and brief introduction to Chomsky's ideas done by himself. All these seemingly diverse topics (language, knowledge, politics/anarchism, and mysteries) belong together simply because he was interested in them during his lifetime.