Louis Couturat (2): Leibniz, logic, & artificial language

Now on my web site: a section of Louis Couturat's essay 'The Principles of Logic' in Logic (1913) by Arnold Ruge et al, with a focus on univocity & reversibility in an artificial language, with examples from Ido:

Logic and Language (The Principles of Logic) by Louis Couturat

Couturat's essay reflects the philology (ancestor of modern linguistics) of the time, with notions about the evolution of natural languages and so on. I am not familiar enough with the language Ido to judge its application if any of univocity with respect to the lexicon (semantics), or if the grammar is more logical than Esperanto in ways other than word derivation, not that I am familiar with word derivation in Ido either. Word derivation in Esperanto is inconsistent and less than logical, and the prepositions still carry some idiomatic uses over from Esperanto's source languages. Note also that Couturat is concerned here strictly with logic and precision. There is no consideration of aesthetics, artistic uses, or the speech community of an artificial language, which is where Ido's ancestor, Esperanto, most successfully pitched its tent.

On my web site see also:

Histoire de la Langue Universelle par Louis Couturat & Léopold Leau (1903)

"Leibniz, Couturat kaj la Teorio de Ido" de Tazio Carlevaro

“Lingvoplanado” (Language Planning) de Rudolf Carnap

You will find also updated and additional links on Couturat's work on Leibniz and logic.

On Carnap as an Esperantist & cosmopolitan (vs Heidegger)

As the philosopher Michael Friedman has recently shown, Carnap knew Heidegger’s work and standpoints well, and had read him quite seriously. He attended the debate between Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos in 1929 and took a walk with Heidegger and conversed with him in a café. He studied Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) and expounded its philosophical purpose to the Vienna Circle around Moritz Schlick as an entrée to the group. Heidegger represented a rival means and approach to “overcoming metaphysics,” the task that this magician of the Black Forest promised to accomplish by going back to a more primordial, prerational sense of human existence, its elementary Dasein, which stood as the opposite of the progress of science and cosmopolitan modernity. Once Heidegger had turned Nazi, Schlick had been murdered, and Carnap, Neurath, and Philipp Frank—along with their allies Hans Reichenbach and Carl Hempel in Berlin— began to migrate West, away from anti-Semitic repression, their political conflict with the forces of the xenophobic Right filled out and extended the terms of the methodological conflict.

This was the original “linguistic turn.” Recent biographies have strongly humanized Rudolf Carnap away from the image of a stern logician and into a true man of enlightenment and a utopian of international cooperation. Carnap favored the construction of “ideal languages” both in logic and in reality, artificial languages that could overcome the errors and historical demerits of natural language, not from any disapproval of human history but because he maintained the cosmopolitan Enlightenment ethos of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace,” as in his love of Esperanto. Friedman has pointed out the touching rhapsody in Carnap’s intellectual autobiography when he recounts teaching himself the language at the age of fourteen and attending a performance of Goethe’s noble Iphigenia performed in the rationalized international language. “It was a stirring and uplifting experience for me to hear this drama, inspired by the ideal of one humanity, expressed in the new medium which made it possible for thousands of spectators from many countries to understand it.” After the tragedy of World War I, young man Carnap hiked through Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania with a Bulgarian friend: “We stayed with hospitable Esperantists and made contact with many people in these countries. We talked about all kinds of problems in public and in personal life, always, of course, in Esperanto.”

SOURCE: Greif, Mark. The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton University Press, 2015), chapter 10--Universal Philosophy and Antihumanist Theory, pp. 288-289.

Logiko & la Memorarto / Logic and the Art of Memory

Pri:

Rossi, Paolo. Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language; translated with an introduction by Stephen Clucas. London; New York: Continuum, 2006. (Translation of the 2nd ed., 1983; orig. 1960)

Vi povas legi ĉerpaĵon ĉe la retejo de Continuum. Jen bonega faka libro pri la tuta intelekta fono de la movado por filozofia universala lingvo, kun pluraj gravaj tradukitaj tekstoj el tiu periodo. La memorarto estas malaperinta intelekta "teknologio", kun radikoj en la Mezepoko kaj koneksoj al la burĝonado de scienco kaj sistemigo de scioj: ĝi gravis antaŭ la amasa presado de libroj en la moderna periodo. Kaj jen (anglalingve), la enhavtabelo:

Translator's Introduction
Preface
Preface to the second edition
I. The Power of Images and the Places of Memory
II. Encylopaedism and Combinatoria in the Sixteenth Century
III. Theatres of the World
IV. The Imaginative Logic of Giordano Bruno
V. Artificial Memory and the New Scientific Method: Ramus, Bacon, and Descartes
VI. Encyclopaedism and pansophia
VII. The Construction of a Universal Language
VIII. the Sources of Leibniz's Universal Character
Appendices
I. The Liber ad memoriam confirmandam of Ramon Lull
II. An anonymous vernacular treatise of the fourteenth century
III. Two fifteenth-century manuscripts on the ars memorativa
IV. Documents on the activities of Pietro de Ravenna
V. Three late sixteenth-century manuscripts on the ars memorativa
VI. Petrarch as teacher of the art of memory
VII. An unpublished text by Giulio Camillo
VIII. Memory exercises in seventeenth-century Germany
IX. The article on 'L'art mnemonique' from Diderot's encyclopaedia
X. D'Alembert and 'real characters'
Notes
Index

Category Theory as Esperanto / Teorio de kategorioj

Category Theory as Esperanto, posted by David Corfield, The n-Category Café (A group blog on math, physics and philosophy), April 11, 2007

Ĉi tiuj matematikistoj malmulte komprenas Esperanton, sed ludas kun la analogio. Plej interesa interlingvistiktema estas priskribo de sciencfikcia romano The Embedding de Ian Watson. Sed la koncerna fako de matematika logiko ja estas interesa, kaj vi povas legi priskribon de ĝi en Esperanto:

Teorio de kategorioj - Vikipedio

Mi iam konis unu el la precipaj matematikistoj en ĉi tiu fako, William Lawvere, kiu cetere estas marksisto (sed en stalinisma kampo).

Rex May, ilustre Loglane

Jen ĉe blogo Amikeco.ru:

Rex May (Baloo)

Rimarku desegnaĵon de Rex May, kiu desegnis plurajn kovrilajn bildojn de Lognet, kaj vizitu ĉi tiun rusan retejon por Loglan:

Логлан. Логический язык

Lojban revisited

I recently finished reading Arika Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages, and now I'm re-reading Andrew Large's The Artificial Language Movement. This led me to revisit my encounters with the Lojban subculture. (Lojban was based on James Cooke Brown's Loglan.) I participated in a number of interchanges with the Lojban people from 1988-1990. My principal concern was the Lojbanists' conceit of testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by creating a metaphysically and culturally neutral language, though I interjected some rejoinders where misleading claims were made about Esperanto. Other Esperantists had a hand in these debates, most prominently the late Don Harlow and the philosopher Tod Moody. I had some influence, the harshness of my interventions notwithstanding. Apparently, the notion that stuck in people's minds was my assertion that cultural neutrality = cultural nullity. See:

Letter on Sapir-Whorf discussions at LogFest ’89 and other topics
by Ralph Dumain

There are links to related interventions and to the primary Loglan and Lojban web sites.

This reminds me of two topics that Dr. Okrent might have covered more fully: (a) the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Lojban's real ability to test it or something else, and the Lojbanists' current thinking on the subject; (b) the nature of the Lojban subculture as an intentional community and its real capacity to enact its putative reflexivity.

To learn more about the development of Lojban and the thinking behind it see the Lojban File Server Roadmap. Here you can find links to old publications, history, discussions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, discussions of Esperanto, various texts and translations, and much more. There are translations of Esperanto texts into English and Lojban.

I note these translations of interest to me:

"On A Bitter Occasion", by Kalman Kalocsay, Esperanto poet. Tr. Nick Nicholas (from Esperanto into English & Lojban)

Martin Luther King's famous "I Have A Dream" speech. Tr. Nick Nicholas (into Lojban)

A poem by Soviet Esperantist Evgeny Mikhalski. Tr. Nick Nicholas (extracts from the Esperanto poem "Ajno" translated into English & Lojban)

Other Lojban translations involving Esperanto include Legend (Orzekso), Lithuanian folk song, The Mildew of the World (Boleslaw Prus).

Louis Couturat, Leibniz, & international languages

Louis Couturat (1868-1914) is not historically beloved in the Esperanto movement, as he was a prime mover behind Ido, a reformed version of Esperanto that split the movement. Couturat nevertheless was a significant figure not only in the international language movement, but in intellectual history, philosophy, logic, and Leibniz scholarship in particular.

Some information can be found in my:

Philosophical and Universal Languages, 1600-1800, and Related Themes: Selected Bibliography

Here I am highlighting Couturat's works of greatest interest to me, with indications of their most current available editions, in English wherever possible. My bibliography overlaps but does not completely coincide with the Wikipedia entry.

De l'Infini mathématique was first published in 1896, and has been reprinted several times.

Two seminal works on Leibniz are La Logique de Leibniz (1901) and Opuscules et Fragments Inédits de Leibniz (1903). See The Logic of Leibniz, a translation in progress by Donald Rutherford.

Histoire de la langue universelle (1903), came out in a 2nd edition in 1907. Also in 1907 Les nouvelles langues internationales was published. There is a reprint edition:

Histoire de la langue universelle, beigebunden ist Les nouvelles langues internationales, by Louis Couturat, Léopold Leau; mit einem bibliographischen Nachtrag von Reinhard Haupenthal. Hildesheim; New York: G. Olms, 1979. xxx, 576, 110 p.

L'Algèbre de la logique appeared in 1905. Note that the English translation is available online courtesy of Project Gutenberg:

The Algebra of Logic, authorized English translation by Lydia Gillingham Robinson, B. A., with a preface by Philip E. B. Jourdain, M. A. (Cantab.) Chicago; London: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1914.

Dover Publications reprinted this translation is 2005. The publisher's description:

In an admirably succinct form, this volume offers a historical view of the development of the calculus of logic, illustrating its beauty, symmetry, and simplicity from an algebraic perspective. Topics include the principles of identity and the syllogism, the principles of simplification and composition; the laws of tautology and of absorption; the distributive law and the laws of duality, double negation, and contraposition; the formulas of De Morgan and Poretsky; Schroder's theorem; sums and products of functions; solution of equations involving one and several unknown quantities; the problem of Boole; Venn diagrams; tables of consequences and causes; and formulas peculiar to the calculus of propositions.

Another seminal work appeared in 1905: Les Principes des Mathematiques: avec un appendice sur la philosophie des mathématiques de Kant. This has been reprinted; the most recent edition I know of is: Paris: A. Blanchard, 1980.

In 1912 a compilation of various authors, Logik, came out in German. An English translation was subsequently published:

Logic, by Arnold Ruge, Wilhelm Windelband, Josiah Royce, Louis Couturat, Benedetto Croce, Federigo Enriques and Nicolaj Losskij; translated by B. Ethel Meyer. London: Macmillan, 1913. x, 269 p.

Of recent vintage is the publication of this important correspondence:

Correspondance sur la philosophie, la logique et la politique, 1897-1913 par Bertrand Russell, avec Louis Couturat ; édition et commentaire par Anne-Françoise Schmid ; transcription et notes sur la langue internationale par Tazio Carlevaro. Paris : Kimé, 2001. 2 v. (734 p.)

Carlevaro is an Esperantist, a co-author of Esperanto en Perspektivo (1974).

Couturat's correspondence with Giuseppe Peano (important mathematician and creator of the language Latino Sine Flexione) has been published (letters in French with introduction in Italian):

Carteggio: 1896-1914. Giuseppe Peano, Louis Couturat; a cura di Erika Luciano e Clara Silvia Roero. Firenze : L.S. Olschki, 2005. lxix, 254 p.

An important conference proceedings (with bibliography) came out in 1983:

L'oeuvre de Louis Couturat: (1868-1914) : ... de Leibniz à Russell. Paris: Presses de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, 1983. 130 p. Contents:

Actualité de Couturat / Maurice Loi -- Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France / Louis Couturat -- Couturat et la conception kantienne de la géométrie / Mario Laserna -- Couturat et la critique des conceptions du temps et ses contemporains Lechalas, Bergson, Evellin / Hervé Barreau -- Louis Couturat et Georg Cantor / Pierre Dugac -- Une remarque sur le problème de la subalternation dans "La logique de Leibniz" de Louis Couturat / Franz Schupp -- Philosophie et science dans la pensée de Louis Couturat / Ubaldo Sanzo -- La correspondance inédite Couturat-Russell / Anne-François Schmid -- Louis Couturat et les mathématiques de son époque / Jean Dieudonnée -- Un promoteur des recherches interdisciplinaires / Alexandre Giuculescu.

The Wikipedia entry contains links to other bibliographies as well as additional references. Aside from other philosophical, mathematical, and logical work, Couturat produced further publications on Ido and international languages.

Leibniz & logikaj lingvoj

La filozofo Leibniz estas bone konata ankaŭ pro ties kontribuo al la historio de universala lingvo, t.e. al la filozofiaj lingvoprojektoj de la frumoderna filozofia kaj scienca epoko.

Pri la temo konsultu mian plejparte anglalingvan bibliografion:

Philosophical & Universal Languages, 1600-1800: Bibliography

Notu ankaŭ pluan artikoleton en Vikipedio: Alfabeto de homa pensado.

Jen pluaj fontoj, anglalingvaj:

Jaap Maat's homepage
Leibniz's rational grammar

Leibniz's Philosophy of Mind (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
3. Language and Mind

Leibnitiana
Leibniz Society of North America Newsletter
Leibniz - EarlyModernTexts.com
Leibniz (George MacDonald R0ss)
Leibniz-Edition (germana)