Volume 22, Number 14 · September 18, 1975
Sin and Significance
By Thomas Nagel
The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other
by Walker Percy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 335 pp., $8.95
Abstract theories about the human mind bear an uneasy relation to our common hope of understanding ourselves. The systematic study of language currently arouses wide and intense interest partly because language, with its central place in human life, seems to promise so much for the understanding of human nature. Yet most of the recent flood of scientific and philosophical research on language aims to advance understanding in ways that cannot be expected to change our lives. While this does not make the results unimportant or uninteresting, it is likely to disappoint the spiritually ambitious.
Review, 3211 words
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