Philosophy Books - Page 15

I Kissed Dating Goodbye: A New Attitude Toward Relationships and Romance

Joshua Harris

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 531 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

The proof is in the pudding 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Some people hate IKDG, and some people love it.
I belong to the second group.
You know the saying "The proof is in the pudding", so let's see what difference Joshua Harris' teachings on courtship make in real life.

Here an experiment I've conducted, that you can try yourself. Go visit a singles group that has an overall dating mindset. Most singles groups do. If singles groups make you uncomfortable, that's why! Observe how guys and girls interact, and see how the `atmosphere' feels like to you. Notice how the most good looking guy and the most good looking girl have more people flirting with them or paying attention to them than other less physically attractive people.

Now go to a singles group that has embraced a courtship culture. Where do you find such a singles group? All sovereign grace churches embrace Joshua Harris' teachings, so you can just find a local SG church at http://www.sovereigngraceministries.org/Churches/USMap.aspx and visit their singles group.

You will notice the HUGE difference in the atmosphere and in how men and women interact with one another between a singles group that embraces dating, and one that embraces courtship.

In the group that embraces courtship, instead of a predatory `feel', it has a familial feel. Men and women interact like they are relatives (brothers and sisters), or old friends. There is a level of comfort, and candor, and lack of flirting that is unlike other singles groups. Notice how the attractive ones are treated no differently than others, and how everybody get about the same level of attention. You don't see a bunch of guys surounding the prettiest girl, or a bunch of girls around the most handsome guy. There's no beauty contest there. People are not trying to attract the greatest number of people, or `get a date'. They just want to get to know one another like family.

I've always avoided singles groups like the plague. The only groups I belonged to were open to everybody, not just specifically for singles. But one of my friends invited me to a discussion group a few months ago. He didn't tell me it was a singles group. I went there and I liked it. I attended the group's events several times before I even knew it was a singles groups! That's how relaxed and familial the atmosphere was. I was certain that the difference in the interaction between guys and girls must be because they did not expect to date one another, but just wanted to build sister/brother friendships. I asked my friend if by any chance that singles group was into coursthip rather than dating. And he confirmed it: they were all for courtship, and the familial relaxed atmosphere there was a direct result of a courtship culture. That group is also part of a Sovereign Grace Church.

I read IKDG when I was 23, and all my Christian friends read it, and it really has made a difference in my ability to develop friendship with guys. Before IKDG my best friends were always girls. After I read the book and was part of a culture that embraced courtship I developed several close friendship with guys. Some of my closest friends today are guys, and my best friend is actually a single guy (it helps that we are absolutely not romantically interested in each other,mostly because we know each other so well we are like twins).

Thanks to IKDG I've had long lasting (10 years) close friendship with single guys, I haven't had my heart broken in a series of dating relationships, I was able to use my singleness to improve my serve in ministry.
And those who say that if you don't date, nobody will want to marry you, are wrong. Several people inquired as to if I would be receptive to enter a courtship with them. I didn't need to date them for them to consider me as a potential wife. However I turned them all down because of a huge difference/incompatibility as far as passion for ministry was concerned.

Keep in mind that a passion for the Lord and for ministry will make your life rich and rewarding whether you are single or married.

I also hightly recommend Don Raunikar's "Choosing God's Best" for a more methodical, highlty detailed approach to courtship (each step from being an acquaintance to being married is described with tips on how to proceed to each following step).

Editorial Review:

Countless teens today feel depressed or discouraged because they don't have a boyfriend or girlfriend. Many single Christians feel frustrated with culture's expectations and patterns of dating. Youth pastors and parents find themselves dealing with young adults who fall into sexual temptation or spend more energy on dating than on following God. I Kissed Dating Goodbye Drive Time Audio(R) offers an all-new approach to dating relationships, calling young adults away from playing the dating game and revealing how they can live a lifestyle of sincere love, true purity, and purposeful singleness. Honest and practical, this powerful book will inspire teens and young adults to remap their romantic lives in the light of God's Word. Not just a book of theory, I Kissed Dating Goodbye Drive Time Audio(R) includes healthy challenges to today's cultural assumptions about relationships and provides solid, biblical alternatives to society's norm.

The Virtue of Selfishness

Ayn Rand

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Total reviews: 125 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

How Selfish 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I find myself again reviewing a book by Ayn Rand that I quite liked. I am not a philosophy major so I won't be arguing about the soundness of her metaphysics or epistemology. I will simply say that while I don't agree with everything she has to say (few would) she makes very interesting observations. Her essay on the concept of human rights as a way to subjugate rulers to moral law is spot on. Her definition of sacrifice is also more logical than another one proposed in another review. Her idea that capitalism is the only free economic system borders on tautological and her support of property rights is a rarity amongst modern "thinkers". Again, while I don't support everything she said (I am still debating the idea of absolute morality, as if morality was something we can discover like the laws of physics) I think she makes strong arguments for personal freedom and the proper relation between a government and its governed.

Adolescent, juvenile philosophy 1 out of 5 stars.
4 of 23 people found this review helpful.

Objectism appeals to an adolescent mind. An individual who has thought about self, non-self, life, meaning, spirituality, materialism ... in any meaningful way cannot but come to the realization that Rand's philosophy is woefully superficial and juvenile. Or so one might hope...

People who are ardent devotees of Rand always seem to impress me as a bit odd. Their personalities and characters seem shallow, robotic, cold, underdeveloped but at the same time they appear smug and self-satisfied.

It is ironic that most Rand followers are intelligent, but not really. It truly does take an intelligent mind to convulute what is intuitive truth and combined with the ruse of so-called logic and rational thinking, build an artifice only a clever but misguided child might.

Rand's raison detre is the concept of "self". But what is the "self"? Rand superficially believes the self begins with one's personal mind or consciousness. And from there, all her "selfish" ethics follow. In her world, everything begins and ends with "self". In other words, the small little world encased in her tiny head.

To be sure, the "self" is the individual. This is not false. And therefore, it is logical that ethics should stem from this source and fountain.

But it's also not all true, either.

This is why Rand appeals to the adolescent. An adolescent is one who is yet maturing from childhood, growing into an adult individual. And this growing into his own is exciting. He is enthralled with his growing independence. His growing awareness of his individuality is exhilerating. To him, his little self is the beginning and end to all things.

But as adolescents grows older, most realize at some level that the "self" is not binary. As the ancient philosophers, mystics and sages before us have realized, the "self" is really a continuum. There are no clear lines. There is no beginning or end. No real boundaries; just those you create.

True wisdom comes when one is able to transcend the conventional, narrow definition of "self" that Rand defines and limits one's self to being.

Does a wider conception of self entail a politics and society empty of individual rights, liberties and freedoms? Of course not. Only a child would come to such a conclusion.

Contrary to Rand, a society that respects individual rights and liberties is possible concomitantly with a culture/philosophy that realizes that the "self" can be and is larger than the individual flesh and bones that encases our egos. It can be a society that respects not only individuals but peoples, nature and everything in the world... to fulfill and seek out their happiness in their own unique way while at the same time, helping each other without the need or expectation of "self interested benefit" in the narrowest sense.

Indeed, unlike Rand, whose ethics are driven by "self-interest"; the ethics of a "larger self" are driven by love and charity. But unlike Rand, the latter would realize that the two are really the same thing inasmuch as love is the enlargement of the self to include others in that idea of self, until ultimately, the binary notion of self disappears altogether.

Logically, then, loving others is really loving one's self inasmuch as one comes to realize that "I" am "you" and "you" are "me".

This realization however comes not by logic alone but intuitively. But it should not be dismissed because of that. All knowledge is first intuitive, until it is rationalized, categorized and logically made sense of by the conscious mind. However, what is intuitively obvious is sometimes mashed up into something else entirely by clever but juvenile minds.

Should self-interest in the Randian sense then play no part in our ethics? No. But in moderation.

If self is a continuum, then our ethics should reflect this. What I do, I do for myself, my family, my friends, my neighbor, for mankind and for the world in general. The mature individual realizes that ethics cannot be constructed based on the narowest definition of self alone. But neither can it be defined based solely on any one particular definition of self as well -- whether that be family, friends, tribe or nation. The mature, rational individual should keep all things in balance; and in this balance, his ethics follow.

I am "self" in the narrowest sense; but my "self" also exists in the widest sense that includes "you" and "everything" else. And when this is realized, "self-interest" = "your-interest" = "our interest" = "all interests" = love = transcendence.

The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

Richard Dawkins

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 343 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

The Blind Watchmaker 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Not an easy book to read, but well worth the effort. Understanding the evidence and arguments for evolution requires effort and thought, whereas believing in invisible and untestable gods is easy, which is why most people choose the latter. Dawkins explains clearly why evolution is the best, indeed the only rational explanation for life as it exists on Earth (other than the FSM, of course. Arrrr!)

Editorial Review:

"The best general account of evolution I have read in recent years."—E. O. Wilson. With a new introduction.

Twenty years after its original publication, The Blind Watchmaker, framed with a new introduction by the author, is as prescient and timely a book as ever. The watchmaker belongs to the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley, who argued that just as a watch is too complicated and functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed. Charles Darwin's brilliant discovery challenged the creationist arguments; but only Richard Dawkins could have written this elegant riposte. Natural selection—the unconscious, automatic, blind, yet essentially nonrandom process Darwin discovered—is the blind watchmaker in nature.

The Master Key System

Charles F. Haanel

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Total reviews: 63 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The REAL master key 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

In the introductory biography which precedes Haanel's work, the publishers highlight at least one reason why you might want to read this book:

"It is Silicon Valley's secret that almost every entrepreneur who made a fortune in recent years did so by studying the words Mr Haanel penned over eighty years ago....Since this book was no longer in print until recently, copies of The Master Key System became a hot commodity in the Valley".

Now I've no way of knowing if this statement is true, but such is the power of Haanel's system that it seems eminently plausible. I would not for a moment want anyone to think that Haanel presents some kind of 'cosmic ordering'-type, 'get-rich-quick' system, and neither is it a book about Law of Attraction. It is far deeper, and more important, than that. Haanel claims that his system can revolutionise your life. I've been working with this kind of system for years, and am emphatically convinced that it works.

At the heart of Haanel's approach is an analytical thesis that was pioneered by Thomas Troward (to whom Haanel refers in this book). Essentially, this thesis is that the universe is governed by an overarching creative process.

Haanel calls this "Universal Consciousness"; Troward called it "Spirit". Neither refers to "God", because the Universal Mind that they describe is an essentially impersonal, 'subjective' force, equivalent to the subconscious rather than the conscious in the human mind. It is more akin to a highest law of nature - a law of creativity - than to a deity. It is impersonal. You do not worship it, but you align your approach with it. Haanel's term "Universal Consciousness" is probably more apt than Troward's "Spirit" because the latter might carry connotations of the occult (though that was certainly not what Troward meant).

Haanel argues that everyone's subconscious is a part of the Universal Consciousness. This gives the individual access to great creative power, in any aspect of life. Anything that manifests in your external world, Haanel argues, has been manifested first in the inner world of your mind. The trick, therefore, is to learn how to discipline your inner world - in other words, to channel your thinking - so that inner creation is positive.

His method, originally published as a part-work, is to set out twenty-four stages of study, each including a mental exercise. Each chapter contains a list of numbered, very precise propositions. This is a very effective, very focused approach.

If you are sceptical about the idea of a universal creative process - and do not believe that thought drives the material - you are not going to like The Master Key System. But if you accept a Troward/Haanel-type analysis of cause and effect, you will find The Master Key System an extremely powerful and effective tool.

Editorial Review:

"Humanity ardently seeks 'The Truth' and explores every avenue to it. In this process it has produced a special literature, which ranges the whole gamut of thought from the trivial to the sublime-up from Divination, through all the Philosophies, to the final lofty Truth of 'The Master Key'. The 'Master Key' is here given to the world as a means of tapping the great Cosmic Intelligence and attracting from it that which corresponds to the ambitions, and aspirations of each reader." So begins 'The Master Key System' by Charles H. Haanel. 'The Master Key System' is a classic work of self-empowerment.

A History of God

Karen Armstrong

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Editorial Review:

"Strange as it may seem, the idea of 'God' developed in a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism," Karen Armstrong asserts in her fascinating work A History of God. Armstrong considers herself a "historian of ideas," and with this broad view she gives a compelling account of the correspondences among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the historical, philosophical, intellectual, and social developments through the ages that both shaped them and were shaped by them.

Religion is "highly pragmatic," Armstrong finds. Any particular idea of God must work for the people who develop it. Consequently, as the times have changed, so have our ideas about God. "Understanding the ever-changing ideas of God in the past and their relevance and usefulness in their time," she says, "will help us to develop a new concept for the future."

Today an increasing number of people have difficulty with the idea of a God that behaves as a larger version of themselves. Armstrong sees this as inevitable, and welcomes believers to a notion of God that "works for us in the empirical age."

Hinds' Feet on High Places

Hannah Hurnard

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Total reviews: 105 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

I ordered this for my daughter's required summer reading. Price was right, and as usual Amazon was quick with delivery! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I did not read this book - it was required summer reading for my 11th grader. Thank you Amazon, as always, for great prices and quick shipping!

Hinds' Feet on High Places 2 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The book was definitely old and yellowed but totally in tact otherwise. It was appropriately priced and well worth it!

Hinds' Feet on High Places 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I was very pleased with the timeliness of delivery and the book was in very great shape. Thanks for an easy purchase.

Timeless 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I have recommended and/or given this book to many, many friends over the years since I first read it. I give it with a caveat: You must have a soft heart toward the Lord and a listening ear for what He will tell you as you read it. It is like no other book as it tells the allegorical tale of Much Afraid and her special traveling companions as she is lead to escape the dismal, loathsome valley she was born to. She encounters many trials and tribulations on her transforming journey -- but Help is ever present, even in the darkest times . . . and the end of the book -- a new beginning. Highly recommend this book!

Editorial Review:

Hinds' Feet on High Places is one of Hannah Hurnard's best known and best loved books. It is a beautiful allegory dramatizing the yearning of God's children to be led to new heights of love, joy, and victory. Follow Much-Afraid on her spiritual journey through difficult places with her two companions, Sorrow and Suffering. Learn how Much-Afraid overcomes her tormenting fears as she passes through many dangers and mounts at last to the High Places. There she gains a new name and returns to her valley of service, transformed by her union with the loving Shepherd.

New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America

Burton W., Jr. Folsom

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A sharply critical new look at Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency reveals government policies that hindered economic recovery from the Great Depression -- and are still hurting America today.

In this shocking and groundbreaking new book, economic historian Burton W. Folsom exposes the idyllic legend of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a myth of epic proportions. With questionable moral character and a vendetta against the business elite, Roosevelt created New Deal programs marked by inconsistent planning, wasteful spending, and opportunity for political gain -- ultimately elevating public opinion of his administration but falling flat in achieving the economic revitalization that America so desperately needed from the Great Depression. Folsom takes a critical, revisionist look at Roosevelt's presidency, his economic policies, and his personal life.

Elected in 1932 on a buoyant tide of promises to balance the increasingly uncontrollable national budget and reduce the catastrophic unemployment rate, the charismatic thirty-second president not only neglected to pursue those goals, he made dramatic changes to federal programming that directly contradicted his campaign promises. Price fixing, court packing, regressive taxes, and patronism were all hidden inside the alphabet soup of his popular New Deal, putting a financial strain on the already suffering lower classes and discouraging the upper classes from taking business risks that potentially could have jostled national cash flow from dormancy. Many government programs that are widely used today have their seeds in the New Deal. Farm subsidies, minimum wage, and welfare, among others, all stifle economic growth -- encouraging decreased productivity and exacerbating unemployment.

Roosevelt's imperious approach to the presidency changed American politics forever, and as he manipulated public opinion, American citizens became unwitting accomplices to the stilted economic growth of the 1930s. More than sixty years after FDR died in office, we still struggle with the damaging repercussions of his legacy.

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

James W. Douglass

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Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Could be the start of American Enlightenment Period 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 9 people found this review helpful.

Book review, by Mike Palecek

JFK And The Unspeakable

By James W. Douglass

Orbis Books, 2008





I waited my whole life to read James W. Douglass' new book, "JFK And The Unspeakable."

The wait was not worth it.

I should not have had to wait, at all.

This is supposed to be America, but it is not.

That is why I was made to wait.

Americans should not have to wait.

We like to have it right now. We want what we want when we want it.

Now.

Please.



Sister Ellen walked into our third grade classroom, hands tucked neatly into the opposite brown sleeve.

She was the principal at Sacred Heart elementary, and she only came to the classrooms to announce that the poorest kid in our class and his large family had run off a bridge this morning on the way to school, or lead us down to the gym for the Christmas movie and extra chocolate milk.

So on Nov. 22, 1963, when lean, tall, straight Ellen floated in just after lunch recess -- pre-Vatican II sisters had no feet, legs, arms, no hair -- we saw the Franciscan specter of death.

Later, Mom ironed while she watched the caisson and "Black Jack," the riderless horse, on the black and white television in the front room.

This was Norfolk, Nebraska.

The Norfolk Daily News and WJAG told us it was Oswald. We just assumed, along with the Omaha World-Herald, that the Warren Commission had been commissioned by God.

Hometown hero Johnny Carson grilled an actual hero, attorney Jim Garrison, because Garrison had the gall to think for himself.

Then followed days and decades of lies.

My mother and I watched out the back door at the turn of the `70s, toward the railroad track, to see if Dad might go past, while grandma Josie sat in her room in the dark, afraid to speak at all.

My dad died to open the `80s, the day before Ruth and I were married.

Football on TV, and lies.

Pot roast on Sunday, with lies.

Turkey and dressing for Thanksgiving. White lies? Dark lies?

Most recently Peter Jennings and ABC News felt the need to cement the lies some forty years after the Kennedy coup.

The program includes a computer-generated reconstruction of the shooting that confirms that Oswald was the lone gunman. And it finds no persuasive evidence of a conspiracy to kill the president.

Through it all, through the fog of American cultural propaganda, some persisted, some wanted the truth, some like Oliver Stone in "JFK" in 1991, hit hard enough to make the ground quiver for a moment, crack in some places.

But the cracks were quickly filled by volunteers with footballs, turkey, dressing, cranberries, credulity.



Now comes James W. Douglass, long-time peace activist, professor, Catholic Worker.

Why is his book the one I've been waiting for?

Maybe it's because of the flood of new information, at least new to me.

Maybe it's the way Douglass lays it out, on the line, straight and true, brick by brick, looking us in the eye and telling us it was the CIA who killed John F. Kennedy.

And that it was because of money.

Of course.

Is there something else?



I'm not an assassination expert.

I am an expert in living in America.

I am a Ph.D in suffering through America, its propaganda, its holiday dinners, football afternoons, coffee conversations, newspaper articles, television news shows, entertainment shows.

If there were one thing worth listening to or hearing out of all those, there would be no need to excuse oneself to go stand in the garage smoking hidden cigarettes, holding the knife at your neck, then putting the cigarettes back into the hiding spot and the knife as well, and going back, to try once more to think and live and act as an American.

I happen to hold several advanced degrees in American Culture -- years and decades spent sitting in comfortable chairs wearing new Christmas pajamas, balancing a Jethro Bowl of cherry black walnut ice cream in my lap, seeking enlightenment by watching Johnny Carson, Don Rickles, Dean Martin, Ed McMahon.

And then going to bed convinced beyond any reasonable doubt there is nothing more.

This is what there is.

This is life.

All there is to see and know is what I can see in my peripheral vision while watching Big Red Football, Gunsmoke, Mayberry RFD, Happy Days, Survivor.

That is all our Norfolk High School "U.S. History" books, all my parents, Isabel and Milosh, the parish priests, mailman have to tell us.

They were my Socrates and I was their Plato, and in our daily discourse I learned not to ask certain questions.

Over the years and decades I had it drilled into me the beauty and wonderment and majesty that the rain was good for the farmers and that it would get cold again this winter.

In the Athens that I imagined Norfolk to be, with its Central Park band pavilion and its "world's largest stockyard," which was also a lie, I learned not to learn.



But now ... an unknown stone falls from the sky.

Well ... someone pick it up.

What's this?

There is more?

A lot more.



The land of the free and the home of the brave murders its own presidents when they threaten the men with the money, like the ones who contributed to the schools we grew up in and the newspapers and the ...

Oh, my.

The amber waves of grain will roll right over you, your children, your house if you stand in their path in any meaningful way.

Murder, Inc.

The business of America is business.

To protect and to serve.

We will kill you and you and your sons and daughters, grandmothers to get what we want.

What we want is to eat and watch television in the dark.



While we grow wrinkles trying to figure out two plus two, those who have made that their profession, manipulate ... everything.

We vote and we work and we study and we worry about our children having Ho Ho's in their lunchbox and friends on the bus.

And we pay money earned on our knees to hire men and women to kill leaders and overthrow governments to make more money for those who built our schools and run our newspapers, and ...

And if those people also decide that our president should die, then we can do that too.

And we pay to have that done. Like having the carpet cleaned, the lawn mowed, the oil changed.

And no newspaper or radio station or TV station will ever talk about it.

Unless telling us that it never happened.

And we will believe them.

Because not believing them means figuring out something else to believe.

And we have things to do. We have lives ... to live.



And those lives mean nothing, less than nothing, because they are built, constructed ... days laid down unevenly, brick by brick ... on lies and murder.

Lies. Murder.

Lies. Killing.

Lies. Death.

And it goes on and on as if it will never stop.



And then one unexpected day, along comes a brave man, like those brave men murdered, who is not like the weak men with the lies.

And everything changes.

A revolution without guns.

A cultural revolution, an undelicate purging of turkey and cranberries, a detoxification.

A new enlightenment, like the one that spawned the men who made this country -- that the recent men have destroyed.



And the time does not seem quite so long.

Then and now are connected. Brought together.

Come together.

And now maybe.

Maybe our children will not live within lies, houses of lies, schools of lies, lives of lies.

Just maybe.

Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds

Joel L. Kraemer

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

This authoritative biography of Moses Maimonides, one of the most influential minds in all of human history, illuminates his life as a philosopher, physician, and lawgiver. A biography on a grand scale, it brilliantly explicates one man’s life against the background of the social, religious, and political issues of his time.

Maimonides was born in Córdoba, in Muslim-ruled Spain, in 1138 and died in Cairo in 1204. He lived in an Arab-Islamic environment from his early years in Spain and North Africa to his later years in Egypt, where he was immersed in its culture and society. His life, career, and writings are the highest expression of the intertwined worlds of Judaism and Islam.

Maimonides lived in tumultuous times, at the peak of the Reconquista in Spain and the Crusades in Palestine. His monumental compendium of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, became a basis of all subsequent Jewish legal codes and brought him recognition as one of the foremost lawgivers of humankind. In Egypt, his training as a physician earned him a place in the entourage of the great Sultan Saladin, and he wrote medical works in Arabic that were translated into Hebrew and Latin and studied for centuries in Europe. As a philosopher and scientist, he contributed to mathematics and astronomy, logic and ethics, politics and theology. His Guide of the Perplexed, a masterful interweaving of religious tradition and scientific and philosophic thought, influenced generations of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thinkers.

Now, in a dazzling work of scholarship, Joel Kraemer tells the complete story of Maimonides’ rich life. MAIMONIDES is at once a portrait of a great historical figure and an excursion into the Mediterranean world of the twelfth century. Joel Kraemer draws on a wealth of original sources to re-create a remarkable period in history when Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions clashed and mingled in a setting alive with intense intellectual exchange and religious conflict.

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.)

Steven Pinker

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A Thorough and Entertaining Introduction to Language 5 out of 5 stars.
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As someone who has had a fascination about languages, this book was the perfect choice for my undergraduate neuroscience class--it's objective is to elucidate how the mind creates language. The prose is extremely well-written and complex ideas clearly explained. Pinker takes the reader on a very fun and thought-provoking journey, providing fascinating insights for both the casually-interested reader and linguists alike. I will highlight on some key points presented throughout.

The first sections illustrate the key themes that Pinker will elaborate on throughout the rest of the book. He presents language as being an evolutionary adaptation that is unique to humans, just as much as a trunk is an adaptation for elephants or sonar for a bat. It is an instinct that we innately are born with. One of the myths about language is the notion that language is taught or transmitted, whether from mother to baby, or from one civilization to another. In actuality, children seem to be born with "Universal Grammar," a blueprint for all grammars on earth. "Virtually every sentence is a brand new combination of words. Therefore a language cannot be a repertoire of responses; the brain must contain a recipe or program that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words (9)." Likewise, there has yet to be a civilization found that is devoid of language. For example, a group of a million people had inhabited an area isolated from the rest of the world in New Guinea for forty thousand years, yet had independently developed their own language, as discovered when first contact was made in the 1920s.

Another important concept presented is "mentalese", a euphemism for a theory of thinking known as "computational/representational theory of mind." It essentially negates the common myth that thought is dependent on language and its corollary, that since people of different backgrounds than us have different languages, they must think differently. There is thought to be a universal "mentalese," and to "know a language" is simply being able to translate mentalese into strings of words in that language.

The second section of the book is a comprehensive summary of the basic parts of language, with plentiful information regarding syntax, phrase structure, morphemes, and more. A key point made is the recent discovery of a common anatomy in all the world's languages, called "X-bar theory." With the general set of rules, children do not have to "learn" lists and lists of rules for each language via rote memorization, but are born knowing the linguistic framework. They are then able to go from speaking a few isolated words to complex yet grammatically coherent sentences in a matter of months.

In the next section, Pinker introduces the concept of the "parser", which is the mental program that analyzes sentence structure during language comprehension. Grammar is simply a protocol, which does not necessitate understanding. In a nutshell, as the person reads a sentence, the parser will group phrases, building "phrase trees", consistent with linguistic rules (for example, a noun phrase is followed by a verb phrase). It is interesting that grammatically correct yet poorly constructed sentences can cause a person great difficulty in comprehension--the rationale is that the parser will not present the person with the correct phrase tree, among copious possible combinations.

Pinker goes on to describe the differences between languages. Despite grammatical difference between languages, such as subject(S)/verb(V)/object(O) order (SVO, SOV, etc), fixed-word-order/free-word-order (if phrase order can vary or not), there are striking similarities. The most prominent are implications--if a language has X, it will have Y. For example, if the basic order of a language is SOV, it will have question words at the beginning of the sentence (234).

Pinker cites three processes that act on languages that result in the differences that we see evident in languages today: innovation, learning, and migration. For example in the case of migration, though the roots of English are from Northern Germany, the existence of thousands of French words in English is the legacy of the invasion of Britain by the Normans in 1066. One of the most broad-reaching relationships between current modern languages can be traced back to the possible existence of a proto-Indo-European language, whose modern-day descendents span from Western Europe to the Indian subcontinent.


Over the final chapters, Pinker elaborates on the amazing explosion of language acquisition in children during their first three years. He explains the significance of Broca's and Wernicke's in language, by examining different cases of aphasia with patients having damage to those areas. Our current understanding of the brain does not allow us to be able to predict what the impact of damage to these areas are from patient to patient--it is frequently witnessed that patients with damage in identical places to these areas have different types of aphasia.

As a final note, Pinker makes a distinction between prescriptive rules, such as grammatical rules that we are taught in school, and descriptive rules, the way people actually talk. In response to the former, he makes a claim that using non-standard English such as "I can't get no satisfaction" versus the standard English "I can't get any satisfaction" is not wrong linguistically, as it is simply a different dialect with an internally consistent grammar. The evident double-negative (which is "wrong" in standard English) is simply a remnant of Middle English, where double-negatives were ubiquitous. As long as the grammatical rules of any language are consistent and systematic, as in the seemingly wrong non-standard English, they follow the descriptive rules and are linguistically correct.


Overall, The Language Instinct is a great read for anyone even remotely interested in the topic. The scope is immense, from basic linguistics, to language development, to language evolution, to genetics, to overall mind design. In addition to being introduced to very important linguistic concepts, you will have an amazing amount of entertaining examples to share in any setting.

Editorial Review:

In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.