Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein: How to Play Games With Words

by Roy Harris

Eloquent Spaces adopts the twin analytic of meaning and community to write a fresh history of building in early India. It presents a new perspective on the principles and practices of early Indian architecture.Defining it broadly over a range of space uses, the book argues for architecture as a form of cultural production as well as public consumption. Ten essays by leading archaeologists, architects, historians and philosophers, examining different architectural sites and landscapes, including Sanchi, Moodabidri, Srinagar, Chidambaram, Patan, Konark, Basgo, and Puri, demonstrate the need to look beyond the built form to its spirit, beyond aesthetics to cognition, and thereby to integrating architecture with its myriad living contexts. The volume captures some of the semantic diversity inherent in premodern Indian traditions of civic building, both sacred and secular, which were, however, unified in their insistence on enacting meaning and a transcendent validity over and above utility and beauty of form. The book is a quest for a culturally rooted architecture as an alternative to the growing crisis of disembededness that informs modern praxis.This volume will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of architecture, ancient Indian history, philosophy, art history, and cultural studies.

Genres: Philosophy, Language, Linguistics

136 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1988

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Roy Harris is Emeritus Professor of General Linguistics in the University of Oxford and Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall. He has also held university teaching posts in Hong Kong, Boston and Paris and visiting fellowships at universities in South Africa and Australia, and at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

blogged 20 Nov 2007

http://marklindner.info/blog/2007/11/...

Despite the differences between Saussure’s and Wittgenstein’s later thoughts on language they are remarkably similar. In this book, Harris explicates the games analogy that both used. http://marklindner.info/blog/2007/12/...

[عهود · Rating 1 out of 5]

ما فهمته، هذي هي الحقيقة وما حبيت اصلًا فكرة تشبيه اللغة بالشطرنج كان فيه بعض الافكار اللي وجدتها رائعة ولكن بالعموم ما اعتبر الكتاب اضاف لي اي شيء وليس السبب انو الكتاب ومعلوماته سخفية لكن يمكن انا فعلًا ما فهمت المكتوب