This text is an account of two conversations with Professor Emma nuel Levinas (1906–1995) in his home in Paris. The first conversation took place July 22, 1980, the second on October 29, 1981. A few questions on paper and an article of mine served as introduction and point of departure for the conversations. Originally it was not my intention to publish the conversations as an “interview.” The idea of making the account of the conversations acceptable for publication only arose later. (...) The original accounts, based on recordings, had to be shortened and worked over considerably to get a coherent text that is interesting for a broader public.Olivier van Wersch-Cot has been very helpful to me through his knowledge of the French language. I am very grateful to Prof. Levinas not only for the friendly way he received me and conversed with me, but also for his consent for the publication of the definitive text. (shrink)

This text is an account of two conversations with Professor Emma nuel Levinas (1906–1995) in his home in Paris. The first conversation took place July 22, 1980, the second on October 29, 1981. A few questions on paper and an article of mine served as introduction and point of departure for the conversations. Originally it was not my intention to publish the conversations as an “interview.” The idea of making the account of the conversations acceptable for publication only arose later. (...) The original accounts, based on recordings, had to be shortened and worked over considerably to get a coherent text that is interesting for a broader public.Olivier van Wersch-Cot has been very helpful to me through his knowledge of the French language. I am very grateful to Prof. Levinas not only for the friendly way he received me and conversed with me, but also for his consent for the publication of the definitive text. (shrink)

Intensional logic is the technical study of such intensional phenomena in human reasoning as modality, knowledge, or flow of time. These all require a richer semantic picture than standard truth values in one static environment. Such a picture is provided by so-called possible worlds semantics, a paradigm which is surveyed in this book, both as to its external sources of motivation and as to the internal dynamics of the resulting program. In particular, Manual of Intensional Logic presents the major classical (...) topics, including modal logic, tense logic, and conditional logic, all of which illustrate motivations coming from philosophy and linguistics. The Book also discusses recent computational applications in computer science and AI. Finally, Manual of Intensional Logic takes up recent developments in the study of language and information making themselves felt in the area. The Book examines the role of partial information--with illustrations drawn from different branches of Intensional Logic--and various influences stemming from current theories of the semantics of natural language, involving generalized quantifiers and theories of types. (shrink)

Retornando al modelo dialógico del discurso racional de la antigüedad, describimos a la lógica como el estudio del flujo general de la información: inferencia, observación y comunicación. Mostramos cómo esta perspectiva aúna ideas de la lógica estándar, la filosofía, la lingüística, la informática y la teoría de juegos.

Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject’s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas—ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting—the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail (...) through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration. (shrink)

This Handbook documents the main trends in current research between logic and language, including its broader influence in computer science, linguistic theory and cognitive science. The history of the combined study of Logic and Linguistics goes back a long way, at least to the work of the scholastic philosophers in the Middle Ages. At the beginning of this century, the subject was revitalized through the pioneering efforts of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Polish philosophical logicians such as Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. Around (...) 1970, the landmark achievements of Richard Montague established a junction between state-of-the-art mathematical logic and generative linguistic theory. Over the subsequent decades, this enterprise of Montague Grammar has flourished and diversified into a number of research programs with empirical and theoretical substance. This appears to be the first Handbook to bring logic-language interface to the fore. Both aspects of the interaction between logic and language are demonstrated in the book i.e. firstly, how logical systems are designed and modified in response to linguistic needs and secondly, how mathematical theory arises in this process and how it affects subsequent linguistic theory. The Handbook presents concise, impartial accounts of the topics covered. Where possible, an author and a commentator have cooperated to ensure the proper breadth and technical content of the papers. The Handbook is self-contained, and individual articles are of the highest quality. (shrink)