[MD] words/time

[MarshaV]

Greetings,

Still thinking about the oral tradition versus the visual tradition, and maybe their effect on the split between the social and the intellectual levels, but meanwhile I thought this was an interesting opinion on 'Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination'.  


DECEMBER 2, 2012, 5:00 PM
Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination

By ERNIE LEPORE and MATTHEW STONE

"Perhaps now more than ever, we spend our days immersed in language. We communicate-talk, write and read-through a burgeoning array of forms and technologies. But most of us rarely stop to think about how language works, or how come we succeed in getting our ideas across in words. It all seems to happen naturally. Poets, novelists, speechwriters or the merely curious sometimes confront these questions, but it is a job that often falls to linguists and philosophers of language.

"Here's one striking puzzle: We speak and write with remarkably different aims.  We sometimes try to get clear on the facts, so we can reach agreement on how things are.  But we sometimes try to express ourselves so we can capture the uniqueness of our viewpoint and experiences.  It is the same for listeners: language lets us learn the answers to practical questions, but it also opens us up to novel insights and perspectives.  Simply put, language straddles the chasm between science and art."

...   


http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/philosophy-and-the-poetic-imagination/   

 
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