Read more
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.
List of contents
Series Editor’s Forward
Preface
Chapter 1 Rationality, the mind and scriptism
Chapter 2 The primitive mind revisited
Chapter 3 Logicality and prelogicality
Chapter 4 Reason and primitive languages
Chapter 5 The great divide
Chapter 6 Aristotle’s language myth
Chapter 7 Logic and the tyranny of the alphabet
Chapter 8 Literacy and numeracy
Chapter 9 Interlude: constructing a language-game
Chapter 10 The literate revolution and its consequences
Chapter 11 The fallout from literacy
Chapter 12 Epilogue: rethinking rationality
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Roy Harris is Emeritus Professor of General Linguistics in the University of Oxford and an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall.
Summary
In this volume, 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.
