Introduction; 1. A passage to modernity; 2. One reason, one world, many monads; 3. The world at war with reason: Britain and France in the eighteenth century; 4. Multiplicity and the Romantic explosion; 5. Essences and universals through the nineteenth century; 6. Boas and the linguistic multiverse; 7. Linguistic relativity: Sapir, Lee, and Whorf; 8. The other side of the mirror: a twentieth-century essentialism; 9. The rise of cognition and the repression of languages; 10. The return of the repressed; Conclusion.
Does your language influence your thought and world view? This book is a history of responses to this question since the 1500s.
John Leavitt is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Montréal.
'… a must-read for anyone concerned with the language-thought
interface.' Asifa Majid, Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics
'This volume has an intriguing, not wholly transparent title. It is
a stimulating account of three distinct topics, the first belonging
to linguistic theory (what is linguistic relativity?), the second
to the history of linguistics (how is/was language diversity
treated in linguistic thought?), and the third to the history of
philosophy (in what way does/did a philosophical perspective
contribute to clarifying these questions?).' Giulio Lepschy, Modern
Language Review
'I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone interested in the
relation between language and thought, linguistic diversity and to
everyone who is seriously concerned with the development of central
issues in the field of linguistics.' Katerina Stathi, Languages in
Contrast
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