When I set out to write a book about the natural history of breasts, I knew I'd have to answer some awkward questions about my book topic. At a...
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Compelling erudition, incisive wit, and relentlessly critical sensibilities combine to produce a tour de force work of scholarship. Unger draws on both the familiar and the obscure as he dismantles both pedestrian superficialities and egregiously romantic fantasies and fetishizations attached to writing in general and the Chinese writing system in particular. While there is clearly a demythologizing agenda here, Unger has a positive, grounded contribution to philosophy of language to make as well. That the appreciation of this vision comes only with the pleasure of taking Unger's eclectic tour of conceptions of writing from Renaissance to post-modern is the reader's good fortune.
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Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning
Greg, November 14, 2006
Compelling erudition, incisive wit, and relentlessly critical sensibilities combine to produce a tour de force work of scholarship. Unger draws on both the familiar and the obscure as he dismantles both pedestrian superficialities and egregiously romantic fantasies and fetishizations attached to writing in general and the Chinese writing system in particular. While there is clearly a demythologizing agenda here, Unger has a positive, grounded contribution to philosophy of language to make as well. That the appreciation of this vision comes only with the pleasure of taking Unger's eclectic tour of conceptions of writing from Renaissance to post-modern is the reader's good fortune.