Investigations into the origin of language and consciousness
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Investigations into the origin of language and consciousness
（Boston studies in the philosophy of science, v. 44）
D. Reidel Pub. Co , Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, c1984
- Other Title
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Recherches sur l'origine du langage et de la conscience
Available at 33 libraries
Note
Translation of: Recherches sur l'origine du langage et de la conscience
Bibliography: p. 199-212
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Tran Duc Thao, a wise and learned scientist and an eminent Marxist philoso pher, begins this treatise on the origins of language and consciousness with a question: "One of the principal difficulties of the problem of the origin of consciousness is the exact determination of its beginnings. Precisely where must one draw the line between the sensori-motor psychism of animals and the conscious psychism that we see developing in man?" And then he cites Karl Marx's famous passage about 'the bee and the architect' from Capital: ... what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in the imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. (Capital, Vol. I, p. 178, tr. Moore and Aveling) Thao follows this immediately with a second question: "But is this the most elementary form of consciousness?" Thus the conundrum concerning the origins of consciousness is posed as a circle: if human consciousness pre supposes representation (of the external reality, of mental awareness, of actions, of what it may), and if this consciousness emerges first with the activity of production using tools, and if the production of tools itself pre supposes representation - that is, with an image of what is to be produced in the mind of the producer - then the conditions for the origins of human
Table of Contents
First Investigation.- The Indicative Gesture as the Original Form of Consciousness.- Second Investigation.- Syncretic Language.- I. The Development of the Instrument.- From Prehominid to Homo Habilis.- From the Preparation of the Instrument to its Elaboration.- The Genesis of Stone Working - The Kafuan as the Second Stage of Prehominid Development.- From the Elaboration of the Instrument to its Production - The Olduvian as the Final Stage of the Gestation Period.- II. The Birth of Language.- The Developed Indicative Sign.- The Beginning of Language in the Prehominids.- The First Signs of Representation.- A. The beginnings of representation in the child.- B. The origins of the sign of representation in prehominid development.- C. The composite indicative sign.- D. The general formula of the representation of the absent object.- E. The sign of syncretic representation of the instrumental form.- F. Deferred imitation as insistent syncretic sign of representation of the motion of the absent object.- The Functional Sentence.- A. The elementary forms of the functional sentence.- B. The beginnings of the functional sentence in phylogenesis.- C. Developed types of the functional sentence.- D. The disengagement of the form and the birth of the name.- III. The Alveolus of the Dialectic of Knowledge.- to Sentence Formation.- Third Investigation.- Marxism and Psychoanalysis - The Origins of the Oedipal Crisis.- I. The Origin of the Pre-Oedipal Stage.- II. The Genesis of the Oedipal Crisis.- III. The Biological Tragedy of Woman and the Birth of Homo Faber.- IV. The Sign of the Phallic Woman and Oedipal Semantics.- V. The Castration Symbol and the Female Oedipus.- VI. From the Neanderthal 'Oedipus' to the Infantile Oedipus.- Notes.- Index of Names.
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