Workshop on Ideas on Language Throughout the Ages


CFA: Workshop on Ideas on Language Throughout the Ages
Date: September 12th, 2019
Deadline for Abstracts: April 15th, 2019
Location: University of Lisbon, Portugal

We welcome scholars to participate in a one-day workshop on how language has 
been defined and approached differentially throughout history within 
philosophical, linguistic, psychological, and socio-anthropological schools 
of thought. Possible topics can include but are not limited to:

. Origins and rationale of logic and semantics as areas of research
. Origins, histories, and methodologies of philology, diachronic and 
synchronic linguistics, Chomsky’s linguistics, biolinguistics and cognitive 
linguistics
. Origins, histories, and methodologies of anthropological linguistics and 
sociolinguistics
. The role of language in different cosmologies, religions and ideologies
. Language as order, knowledge and reason (logos theories, universalia 
debates, rationalism)
. The social and political role of language as debated by social contract 
theoreticians and moral philosophers
. The search for an “Adamic” language or the reconstruction of a “mother 
language,” “primordial”- or “proto”-language
. Ideas on the “purification” of existing languages for purposes of 
knowledge acquisition or communication
. Language versus communication
. The reference problem & the indeterminacy of translation
. Language as the limit of one’s world
. Language games, language as power, language as identity and nationality
. Signs and codes as defined in (bio)semiotics and their relation to 
concepts of information, communication and language
. Evolutionary epistemology and language
. Language and consciousness, language and cognition
. Embodiment and language
. Body language
. Language as culture
. Language and art

General information
The workshop is organized by Marta Facoetti & Nathalie Gontier of the 
Applied Evolutionary Epistemology Lab of the Centre for Philosophy of 
Science that is part of the Department for History and Philosophy of Science 
at the Faculty of Science of the University of Lisbon.
The workshop will be organized as a satellite event following the Protolang 

Abstract submission by April 15th, 2019
Expressions of interest, questions, and 150 word long abstracts containing 
author/s details, email/s, and full affiliation/s can be sent to Marta 
Facoetti. Email address and more information is available at 

Fees
The registration fee will be set at 75 euro and includes free access to 
Protolang 6 when not presenting at that conference. When also presenting at 
Protolang 6 the regular fees for that conference apply, but then 
participation to this workshop is free.