Overview

Language and logic are inextricably commingled in our everyday speech. What we say, particularly in the form of statements, tends not only to mirror our world, but mold it into our own image. This book looks at how much of our verbal communication can be considered valid from the point of view of the rules of logic. Are we saying what we mean to say? Is what we hear from the media, our peers, our leaders, and those who determine the narrative story of our lives meaningful, rational, and logical? Even more important than the answers to these questions is the answer to whether we are the governors and rulers of our own lives. Have we abdicated this sovereign rule to forces that may not have our best interests and wellbeing in mind?Using works of Continental and analytic philosophy ancient and modern, psychology, linguistics, religion, and literature, this book supports the thesis that we have surrendered the only thing we could ever possibly own - ourselves - for unprecedented access to consumer goods, credit, and the hope for medical immortality. Further, the argument is made that the prevailing discourse of global modern culture consists of statements which are invalid because their inner semantic structure is inherently contradictory. The argument is aimed at those who want to learn more about what makes our everyday discourse and thinking rational or irrational. At the same time, it indicts the individual of the modern industrialized state for the crime of the voluntary abdication of his sovereignty and for forcing others who have little control over their lives to do the same. This book is a call for introspection in the hope that the reader will see something of the situation described reflected not only in himself, but in the society he inhabits.

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9781527516427

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Andrew Spano has woven together an intricate, looming weft of theory, a framework of philosophical concepts that pitches the political demands of our time to the impulse of a cri de coeur. Commanding a distinctive range of abstruse learning, he works his way through categories of inquiry and analysis that move his readers from the essential attributes of time and space through levels of political, scientific, mathematical, logical, epistemological, and phenomenological investigation, and delivers as his central realization a stunning anatomy of hegemony dominating the world as we live it today: descending through layer after layer of compounding and mutually inducing simulacra. Using Orwell's 1984 as his touchstone of evaluation, in his hands the world as spectacle has never been more politically imperative. We are due his sense of urgency. Professor Mark Daniel CohenAssistant Dean, The European Graduate School, Switzerland

Author Information

Andrew Spano is Foreign Expert at Liaoning University, China, having previously worked as Assistant Professor at New York University and Lecturer at Northeastern University, USA. He was awarded a PhD in Philosophy by the European Graduate School, a Master of Arts in English by the University of Vermont, and a Bachelor of Arts by Norwich University, USA.

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