“We have been given a powerful and often uplifting vision of what it is to be truly human.” —John Cottingham, The Tablet In seminal works ranging from Sources of the Self to A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has shown how we create possible ways of being, both as individuals and as a society. In his new book setting forth decades of thought, he demonstrates that language is at the center of this generative process. For centuries, philosophers have been divided on the nature of language. Those in the rational empiricist tradition—Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, and their heirs—assert that language is a tool that human beings developed to encode and communicate information. In The Language Animal, Taylor explains that this view neglects the crucial role language plays in shaping the very thought it purports to express. Language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning and fundamentally shapes human experience. The human linguistic capacity is not something we innately possess. We first learn language from others, and, inducted into the shared practice of speech, our individual selves emerge out of the conversation. Taylor expands the thinking of the German Romantics Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt into a theory of linguistic holism. Language is intellectual, but it is also enacted in artistic portrayals, gestures, tones of voice, metaphors, and the shifts of emphasis and attitude that accompany speech. Human language recognizes no boundary between mind and body. In illuminating the full capacity of “the language animal,” Taylor sheds light on the very question of what it is to be a human being.

Animal Perception and Literary Language shows that the perceptual content of reading and writing derives from our embodied minds. Donald Wesling considers how humans, evolved from animals, have learned to code perception of movement into sentences and scenes. The book first specifies terms and questions in animal philosophy and surveys recent work on perception, then describes attributes of multispecies thinking and defines a tradition of writers in this lineage. Finally, the text concludes with literature coming into full focus in twelve case studies of varied readings. Overall, Wesling's book offers not a new method of literary criticism, but a reveal of what we all do with perceptual content when we read.

Rudolf Steiner’s architectural masterpiece, the double-domed building known as the first Goetheanum, featured decorated ceilings that were designed and partly painted by Steiner himself, utilizing vegetable colors and a new layering technique. Steiner emphasized that he was seeking a new artistic conception based on a conscious understanding of the nature of color. Contemporaries report the extraordinary effect of the domed ceilings’ paintings combined with the multicolored light emanating from the engraved glass windows. The cupolas depicted the creation and ages of the world, the initiators of the various cultural epochs and the figure of Christ. Tragically, the ‘complete work of art’ that was the first Goetheanum burned down on New Year’s Eve 1922 – so today we can only get an impression of the lost paintings and windows from Rudolf Steiner’s pastel sketches and drawings and a handful of photographs. In this lavish volume, the result of decades of research and study, Hilde Raske provides a detailed examination of the artistic work on the two cupolas, including Rudolf Steiner’s draft sketches and his written and verbal statements. Featuring 30 color and more than 100 black-and-white illustrations, this printing is a high-quality facsimile of the long out-of-print original edition from 1983.

This book provides an overview of current K-12 courses and programs offered in the United States as correspondence study, or via such electronic delivery systems as satellite, cable, or the Internet. The Directory includes over 6,000 courses offered by 154 institutions or distance learning consortium members. Following an introduction that describes existing practices and delivery methods, the Directory offers three indexes: • Subject Index of Courses Offered, by Level • Course Level Index • Geographic Index All information was supplied by the institutions. Entries include current contact information, a description of the institution and the courses offered, grade level and admission information, tuition and fee information, enrollment periods, delivery information, equipment requirements, credit and grading information, library services, and accreditation.