In this concise and startling book, the author of One-Dimensional Man argues that the time for utopian speculation has come. Marcuse argues that the traditional conceptions of human freedom have been rendered obsolete by the development of advanced industrial society. Social theory can no longer content itself with repeating the formula, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," but must now investigate the nature of human needs themselves.
For years, the prevailing opinion among academics has been that language is embedded in our genes, existing as an innate and instinctual part of us. In this bold and provocative study, linguist Daniel Everett argues that, like other tools, language was invented by humans and can be reinvented or lost.
This is the second volume of a two-volume work that introduces a new and fundamentally different conception of language structure and linguistic investigation. The central claim of cognitive grammar is that grammar forms a continuum with lexicon and is fully describable in terms of symbolic units (i.e. form-meaning pairings). In contrast to current orthodoxy, the author argues that grammar is not autonomous with respect to semantics, but rather reduces to patterns for the structuring and symbolization of conceptual content.
Engel argues that, although the minimalist conception of truth is basically right, it does not follow that truth can be eliminated from our philosophical thinking, as is claimed by some radical deflationists. In particular, he shows that some deflationist views have a definitively relativist and "postmodernist" ring and should be rejected. Even if a metaphysically substantive theory of truth has little chance to succeed, he argues, truth plays a central role as a norm or guiding value of our rational inquiries and practices in the philosophy of knowledge and in ethics.
The gentry played a central role in medieval England, yet this is the first sustained attempt to explore the origins of the gentry and to account for its contours and peculiarities as a social formation. The book offers definition and conceptual vigour, and argues that the gentry, a kind of lesser nobility, was formed between the mid-thirteenth and the mid-fourteenth century.
