Enrique Chavez

This interview with Silvana Rabinovich, a philosopher working at the crossroads of ethics, discourse analysis, decolonial thought and political theology, presents an overview of Rabinovich’s positions regarding the study of language and languages. It then proceeds to the philosophical problems of translating and observes the connections between translation and interreligious dialogue by looking at the case of Judeo-Arabic language. The conversation then moves on to explore Rabinovich’s idea, drawing on Levinas, of building a heteronomous relationship with language. In its closing part, the interview presents an apt comment on how academics might contribute to the solving of social problems.

The main aim of this article is to show how a possible theoretical articulation between Uexkull’s notion of Funktionskreis and the stratificational model of semiotic structures proposed by Louis Hjelmslev can be made. In order to bridge the gap between these two models, Luis Prieto’s model of cognition will be used. The advantage of Prieto’s model is that it retains the Hjelmslevian stratificational ideas (i.e. a semiotic structure is made up of an expression and a content plane, each one with a dimension of form and substance), while it also pays attention to agency and practice. To put it briefly, according to Prieto the foundation of practice and knowledge is to be found on aisthesis. Hence, as in Uexküll, there is a way to merge action with perception, while retaining the semiotic structure that makes such a merging possible. The key point, however, is that Prieto’s model calls for an “ontological commitment” to the substance strata (both in expression and in content to some extent). Therefore, bridging Uexküll and Hjelmslev via Prieto suggests a possible way to provide a general structural model of semiosis which is closer to semiotic realism than to immanentism usually attributed to structuralism.

The following interview with John Joseph, a linguist specializing in the history of linguistics, applied linguistics, and the relationships between language and identity, is divided into two parts. The first part presents a small overview of Joseph’s academic trajectory, emphasizing the struggles faced by emerging fields in the linguistics of the 1980s (e.g. language standardization and history of linguistics itself), and then deals with the problems of doing history of linguistics, including questions of the methodology and epistemology of historical approaches. The second part of the interview touches upon the relationships between the history of linguistics and semiotics, the relationships between linguistics and culture, and the problems of subjectivity in linguistics and semiotics. The interview concludes with a small comment on relevant questions linguistics faces when it comes to the role of academics in helping to solve pressing social issues.

This paper aims to show the role played by the relations of comparison and associativity, as they are introduced in Saussure’s Cours de linguistique generale, in the theories of Luis J. Prieto. This is done, first, on the basis of a historiographical approach, and second, on the basis of an exegetical approach to Prieto’s works. Thus, the paper first presents and analyses three programmes, corresponding to three courses Prieto gave at the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba during the early 1950s. The analysis of these programmes will show the centrality of Saussure’s Cours in Prieto’s linguistic theorizing. After this, an attempt will be made to show the continuity between the theoretical tenets presupposed by the courses’ programmes and the main proposal advanced in Prieto’s article “Classe et concept. Sur la pertinence et sur les rapports saussuriens ‘de comparaison’ et ‘d’echange’”. By constructing this continuity we attempt to show: (1) the constant influence the Cours exerted upon Prieto’s thinking throughout his whole career, and (2) that such influence is manifested in the fact that Prieto did not generalize linguistic principles as such, but rather posited that linguistic principles were instances of more general semiotic ones.

Forty two years before Descartes’ birth, in his Antoniana Margarita, Spanish physician and philosopher Gómez Pereira explicitly argues the following assertions: Animals lack reason Animals lack understanding Animals do not think Animals cannot feel Animals cannot see as we do Animals are machines Animals have no rational soul Animals have no indivisible soul Animals have no language The above claims on animal automatism are commonly thought to have originated with Descartes. In this paper I will expound Gómez Pereira’s arguments, contra the School and common sense, in favor of animal automatism and discuss their possible influence on Descartes’ so-called bêtemachine doctrine.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes’s Theory of MindEnrique Chávez-ArvizoDesmond M. Clarke. Descartes’s Theory of Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Pp. viii + 267. Cloth, $49.95.Desmond Clarke, commentator on Cartesian natural philosophy, has now published an interpretation of Descartes's dualism, a theme which can hardly be said to be underrepresented in the literature. The monograph is divided into nine chapters concerned with explanation, sensation, imagination and memory, the passions, the will, language, thought, substance, and property dualism—yes, property dualism.The book pushes forward a reading of Descartes's theory of mind, made from a perspective which Clarke has adopted over the last three decades or so, that maintains that Descartes was primarily (and willingly) a scientist and incidentally (and reluctantly) a philosopher. From this viewpoint, according to Clarke, natural philosophy provides the paradigm for genuine explanation in Descartes's metaphysics. Furthermore, given that Descartes rejects Scholastic substantial forms and real qualities as explanatorily infertile and since substances are equally unfruitful, substances play no explanatory role in his system of philosophy. Substance dualism is not at the center of Descartes's philosophy of mind; his account of explanation is. This makes Descartes not a substance dualist; but a property dualist. So argues, in very broad strokes, Clarke. [End Page 116]Unlike us, Descartes did not draw a sharp distinction between philosophy and science. For him, these two realms of enquiry were part of a unified realm of knowledge, what he deemed scientia or philosophy in the wider sense. Hence his use of the instructive metaphor of philosophy as a tree, whose roots are metaphysics, the trunk physics, and the branches the other sciences which he reduces to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics, and morals (Letter Preface to Picot, French translation of the Principles of Philosophy, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery [Paris: Vrin, 1989], 14). However, Descartes did distinguish the roots from the trunk, that is, metaphysics (or "first philosophy") from physics (or "natural philosophy"). Commentators on Descartes's system of philosophy ignore his natural philosophy at their peril, for it does shed considerable light on his metaphysics. But, likewise, Descartes's philosophy greatly illuminates his science. It is for this reason that I want to cast doubt on Clarke's apparent scientific imperialism in which Descartes's methodological, epistemological, and metaphysical concerns are forced to play second fiddle to his scientific views. We cannot neatly fit Descartes's metaphysical views into Clarke's scientific mold, nor can we force them in, without incurring serious error. I do not think that one has to choose between one and the other as being primary, between the tree of knowledge and the inverted tree of knowledge. We need to keep in mind that in Descartes's system of philosophy, both science and philosophy are interconnected and that both parts elucidate each other.Clarke's attempt to eliminate substance from Descartes's account of mind is problematic. True, the term 'substance' is an extremely ambiguous one and Descartes's comments about it are often blurred and puzzling. On the one hand, one must concede that the concept of substance plays a small role in Descartes's natural philosophy, in which although the material universe is depicted in terms of extended substance or res extensa, physics is ultimately unwrapped by way of laws describing the behavior of particles in virtue of their size, shape, and motion. But, in contrast, substance plays a far more prominent role in his metaphysics, not to mention in his theology. This leads to a related point. Clarke overlooks the importance of theology for Descartes's philosophical project and the role of God in Cartesian natural philosophy.The level of argument drops considerably in the final chapter, where Clarke offers an uncritical and not very clear survey of naming and necessity, the identity theory, anomalous monism, and property dualism. This chapter seems in tension with his disapproval of anachronistic readings of Descartes (8-9) and contains some serious slips. Clarke's answer to his own question "Was Descartes, then, a substance dualist" is a mind boggling "Yes and no" (258), and his claim that Descartes was a property dualist, collapses under...