Workshop on Ideas on Language Throughout the Ages

FCUL, Lisboa

We welcome scholars to participate in a one-day workshop on how language has been defined and approached differentially throughout history within philosophical, linguistic, psychological, and socio-anthropological schools of thought. Possible topics can include but are not limited to:

  • Origins and rationale of logic and semantics as areas of research;
  • Origins, histories, and methodologies of philology, diachronic and synchronic linguistics, Chomsky’s linguistics, biolinguistics and cognitive linguistics;
  • Origins, histories, and methodologies of anthropological linguistics and sociolinguistics;
  • The role of language in different cosmologies, religions and ideologies;
  • Language as order, knowledge and reason (logos theories, universalia debates, rationalism);
  • The social and political role of language as debated by social contract theoreticians and moral philosophers;
  • The search for an “Adamic” language or the reconstruction of a “mother language,” “primordial”- or “proto”-language;
  • Ideas on the “purification” of existing languages for purposes of knowledge acquisition or communication;
  • Language versus communication;
  • The reference problem & the indeterminacy of translation;
  • Language as the limit of one’s world;
  • Language games, language as power, language as identity and nationality;
  • Signs and codes as defined in (bio)semiotics and their relation to concepts of information, communication and language;
  • Evolutionary epistemology and language;
  • Language and consciousness, language and cognition;
  • Embodiment and language;
  • Body language;
  • Language as culture;
  • Language and art.

Abstract submission by April 15th, 2019.

The workshop will be organized as a satellite event following the Protolang 6 conference.

CFCUL