How to Do Things With Words is perhaps Austin's most influential work. In it he attacks what was at his time a predominant account in philosophy, namely, the view that the chief business of sentences is to state facts, and thus to be true or false based on the truth or falsity of those facts. In contrast to this common view, he argues, truth-evaluable sentences form only a small part of the range of utterances. After introducing several kinds of sentences which he assumes are indeed not truth-evaluable, he turns in particular to one of these kinds of sentences, which he deems performative utterances. These he characterises by two features:
* First, to utter one of these sentences is not just to "say" something, but rather to perform a certain kind of action.
* Second, these sentences are not true or false; rather, when something goes wrong in connection with the utterance then the utterance is, as he puts it, "infelicitous", or "unhappy."
The action which performative sentences 'perform' when they are uttered belongs to what Austin later calls a speech act (more particularly, the kind of action Austin has in mind is what he subsequently terms the illocutionary act). For example, if you say “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth," and the circumstances are appropriate in certain ways, then you will have done something special, namely, you will have performed the act of naming the ship. Other examples include: "I take this man as my lawfully wedded husband," used in the course of a marriage ceremony, or "I bequeath this watch to my brother," as occurring in a will. In all three cases the sentence is not being used to describe or state what one is 'doing', but being used to actually 'do' it.
Will Durant - The Story of Civilization 01 - Our Oriental Heritage
"Every chapter, every paragraph in this book will offend or amuse some patriotic or esoteric soul: the orthodox Jew will need all his ancestral patience to forgive the pages on Yahveh; the metaphysical Hindu will mourn this superficial scratching of Indian philosophy; The Chinese or Japanese sage will smile indulgently at these brief and inadequate selections from the wealth of Far Eastern literature and thought. ... Meanwhile a weary author may sympathize with Tai T’ung, who in the thirteenth century issued his "History of Chinese Writing" with these words: "Were I to await perfection, my book would never be finished." (p.ix)
This volume covers "The Orient." In 1935, this term referred to all of history east of Greece or earlier than Homer.
Danish Fairy Tales by Sven Grundtvig translated by J. Grant Cramer (Rare Book Collection)
Fourteen traditional Danish tales of wizardry, witchery, dark forests, remote kingdoms, princesses, and wicked stepmothers.
These folk-tales, and many more, were originally collected by Svendt Grundtvig, a Danish professorand philologist. He found that throughout all the country districts, men and women were telling stories and reciting ballads that they had learned from their grandmothers, who, in their turn, had heard them from crooners of old songs, and tellers of old tales. Professor Grundtvig realized that these echoes of an earlier time were precious; that, if they were not perpetuated in written form, they would be lost. It was a labour of love on his part to collect these tales; a labor that lasted over twenty years, and that enlisted the aid of many of his countrymen. Grundtvig says that he has kept the simplicity and artlessness of the oral tradition; and that, in the case of varying versions from different parts of the country, he has taken the purer and more complete form, but has always preserved the epic unity.
Polish Fairy Tales by A. J. Gliński translated by Maude Ashurst Biggs; illustrated by Cecile Walton (Rare Book Collection)
The frog princess.--Princess Miranda and Prince Hero.--The eagles.--The whirlwind.--The good ferryman and the water nymphs.--The princess of the Brazen Mountain.--The bear in the forest hut
These are selections from a large collection made by A. J. Gliński, printed at Wilna in 1862. These fairy tales come from a far past and may even date from primitive Aryan times. They represent the folklore current among the peasantry of the Eastern provinces of Poland, and also in those provinces usually known as White Russia.
They were set down by Gliński just as they were related to him by the peasants. In the translation it was of course necessary to shorten them considerably; the continual repetition — however quaint and fascinating in the original—cannot easily be reproduced. Portions, too, are often told in rhyme, or in a species of rhyming prose that we associate with the ancient ballad. The obvious likenesses between these and the folklore of Germany, the Celtic nations, or to the Indian fairytales, will strike every reader.
Scientific American, August 19, 2007 Scientific American Digital
In this issue:
NNOVATIONS
Data Center in a Box
By M. Mitchell Waldrop
A shipping container stuffed with servers could usher in the era of cloud computing
PUBLIC POLICY
Race in a Bottle
By Jonathan Kahn
Drugmakers are eager to develop medicines targeted at ethnic groups, but so far they have made poor choices based on unsound science
NEUROSCIENCE
Windows on the Mind
By Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde
Once scorned as nervous tics, certain tiny, unconscious flicks of the eyes now turn out to underpin much of our ability to see. These movements may even reveal subliminal thoughts
MODELING
Predicting Wildfires
By Mark Finney and Mark Fischetti and Patricia Andrews
Fires are burning more acres than ever. Where will the next blazes ignite? Can we prevent them? Should we?
Scientific American, August 19, 2007
