— K. Sayre, professor emeritus, University of Notre Dame
VERN WALKER
Throughout my professional career, I have studied our use of language in reaching goals. As philosopher and professor of philosophy, as attorney and professor of law, as researcher in artificial intelligence. Why we invent new words, how reasoning works, how new concepts evolve, and how new words and concepts integrate into old linguistic frameworks.
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My doctorate in philosophy from Notre Dame grounded me in the history of philosophy, philosophy of language, theory of knowledge and logic. Yale Law School taught me the use of legal language. As a partner in a major law firm in Washington, D.C., I created linguistic bridges between legal language, scientific language, and ordinary language. For nearly 30 years, I taught law at Hofstra University in New York.
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That journey led me to step back and write this book. Becoming more aware of our everyday uses of language can make us more aware of what and who we are.
We are moments through which language flows. We are tributaries to the flood of language. Nearly everything we value would be impossible without language, including our consciousness. We are the creators and creations of language.
As we explore the universe, try to peer outward from its boundaries, and to stare inside its every point, we can glimpse our own reflections in the mirror of language.
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ABOUT THE BOOK
Are words enough to capture the fullness of the human experience?
This short book uses our everyday experience of language to explore meaning in contemporary life. Our use of language should be mysterious, but its familiarity hides the feeling of mystery from us. The book is a meditation on that mystery. Following language outward from descriptions of the present moment, we move through our talk about space and time, to the realm of everyday thinking and science. But language enriches us further—through communities of meaning (morality, art, mysticism) to transcendence (the universe, God, and self). And ultimately, we travel back to the “I” who creates it all.
Using both prose and poetry, the book leads the reader by unaccustomed paths to places where we know that words are no longer adequate.
A mystical appreciation of life can arise simply from living a reflective human life, in which there persists an awareness of thought and language.
Awaken the wonder of language...
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PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
“This Heraclitean-like exploration of language, time, science, relationship, law, and transcendence—written in succinct prose capped with spare, arresting poetry—will lead a reader to self-reflection and to an enriched awareness of reality’s elemental but expansive force. The author’s generous humanity evinces—and evokes—a sense of gratitude ‘for all that is.’”
PATRICK JORDAN,
managing editor emeritus, Commonweal