Racionalita a gramotná mysl – Harris Roy (2016)

The controversial linguist and eccentric philosopher Roy Harris provocatively revises Western notions of the relationship between literacy and rationality in his book Rationality and the Literate Mind. Is rationality merely a byproduct of literacy? How do Aristotle's ideas about language or the so-called language myth relate to logical and rational thinking? What is the connection between the ability to read and write and the ability to calculate? These and other questions are posed by Roy Harris against the backdrop of sharp criticism of scholars from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, Russell, Luria, and Searle, aiming to show that in assessing rationality, we mistakenly regard literacy as a guaranteed and neutral institution. In fact, literacy is the source of the scriptural illusion that exclusively literate rationality is truly rational. Overcoming this illusion for Harris primarily means dealing with the legacy of the Aristotelian conception of language and logic in modern philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and linguistics, and proposing an alternative theory of the sign in the form of integrationist semiology.