Rationality and the Literate Mind (Routledge Advances in Communication and Linguistic Theory) - Softcover

Harris, Roy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415850231 ISBN 13: 9780415850230

Publisher: Routledge, 2013

Synopsis

This book re-examines the old debate about the relationship between rationality and literacy. Does writing "restructure consciousness?" Do preliterate societies have a different "mind-set" from literate societies? Is reason "built in" to the way we think? How is literacy related to numeracy? Is the "logical form" that Western philosophers recognize anything more than an extrapolation from the structure of the written sentence? Is logic, as developed formally in Western education, intrinsically beyond the reach of the preliterate mind? What light, if any, do the findings of contemporary neuroscience throw on such issues? Roy Harris challenges the received mainstream opinion that reason is an intrinsic property of the human mind, and argues that the whole Western conception of rational thought, from Classical Greece down to modern symbolic logic, is a by-product of the way literacy developed in European cultures.

About this title

About the Author

Roy Harris is Emeritus Professor of General Linguistics in the University of Oxford and an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415850231
• ISBN 13: 9780415850230
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 206