What Kind of Creatures Are We?, Noam Chomsky
What Kind of Creatures Are We?, Noam Chomsky
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What Kind of Creatures Are We?

Author: Noam Chomsky

Narrator: John Pruden

Unabridged: 4 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/15/2018


Synopsis

Noam Chomsky is widely known and deeply admired for being the founder of modern linguistics, one of the founders of the field of cognitive science, and perhaps the most avidly read political theorist and commentator of our time. In these lectures, he presents a lifetime of philosophical reflection on all three of these areas of research to which he has contributed for over half a century.

In clear, precise, and non-technical language, Chomsky elaborates on fifty years of scientific development in the study of language, sketching how his own work has implications for the origins of language, the close relations that language bears to thought, and its eventual biological basis. He expounds and criticizes many alternative theories, such as those that emphasize the social, the communicative, and the referential aspects of language. Chomsky reviews how new discoveries about language overcome what seemed to be highly problematic assumptions in the past. He also investigates the apparent scope and limits of human cognitive capacities and what the human mind can seriously investigate, in the light of history of science and philosophical reflection and current understanding. Moving from language and mind to society and politics, he concludes with a searching exploration and philosophical defense of a position he describes as "libertarian socialism," tracing its links to anarchism and the ideas of John Dewey, and even briefly to the ideas of Marx and Mill, demonstrating its conceptual growth out of our historical past and urgent relation to matters of the present.

About Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is a laureate professor at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics, and Chomsky is one of the foremost critics of US foreign policy. He has published numerous groundbreaking books, articles, and essays on global politics, history, and linguistics.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Christopher on December 12, 2015

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......more

Goodreads review by Jim on January 02, 2016

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......more

Goodreads review by Jason on December 06, 2015

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......more

Goodreads review by Paul on July 10, 2021

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......more

Goodreads review by Beauregard on November 13, 2019

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......more