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The Noblest Animate Motion: Speech, Physiology and Medicine in Pre-Cartesian Linguistic Thought (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of ... in the History of the Language Sciences)

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Jeffrey Wollock's encyclopaedic study of the medical tradition of the study of speech and language before Descartes is one of the most absorbing books I have read in a long time. As well as the sheer pleasure I have taken in reading it, it has profoundly changed my understanding of the history of Western linguistic thought. Our modern dissociation of the medical from the philosphical tradition is an anachronistic distortion that has had the effect of giving the mental perspective on language a monopoly, and allowing us to forget what we once knew, that language requires bodies as well. Wollock's account of the long tradition from Aristotle and Galen through to the Renaissance gains coherence and readability by focusing on a small number of problems and puzzles. His introduction pulls no punches in explaining how modern linguistics has been impoverished by the wilful forgetting of the fact that, until the 19th century, few if any of the philosophers who form the historical canon of theories of language neglected natural philosophy, which was adjacent to and overlapped with the study of medicine.