Tag: Tongues

Free Download Mae G. Henderson, "Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora: Black Women Writing and Performing "
English | ISBN: 0195116593 | 2014 | 336 pages | PDF | 26 MB
The oral tradition has always played an important role in African American literature, ranging from works such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. These and countless other novels affirm the power of sonance and sound in the African American literary canon. Considering the wide swath of work in this powerful lineage – in addition to its shared heritage with performance – Mae G. Henderson deploys her trope of "speaking in tongues" to theorize the preeminence of voice and narration in black women’s literary performance through her reconstruction of a fundamentally spiritual practice as a critical concept for reading black women’s writing dialogically and intertextually.

Free Download Stephen Finlay, "Confusion of Tongues: A Theory of Normative Language "
English | ISBN: 0199347492 | 2014 | 288 pages | PDF | 2 MB
Can normative words like "good," "ought," and "reason" be defined in entirely non-normative terms? Confusion of Tongues argues that they can, advancing a new End-Relational theory of the meaning of this language as providing the best explanation of the many different ways it is ordinarily used. Philosophers widely maintain that analyzing normative language as describing facts about relations cannot account for special features of particularly moral and deliberative uses of normative language, but Stephen Finlay argues that the End-Relational theory systematically explains these on the basis of a single fundamental principle of conversational pragmatics. These challenges comprise the central problems of metaethics, including the connection between normative judgment and motivation, the categorical character of morality, the nature of intrinsic value, and the possibility of normative disagreement. Finlay’s linguistic analysis has deep implications for the metaphysics, epistemology, and psychology of morality, as well as for the nature and possibility of normative ethical theory. Most significantly it supplies a nuanced answer to the ancient Euthyphro Question of whether we desire things because we judge them good, or vice versa. Normative speech and thought may ultimately be just a manifestation of our nature as intelligent animals motivated by contingent desires for various conflicting ends.