Frustula Augustiniana

  Thanksgiving was too late. Too late for what I wanted. No leaves singing laughter still aflutter wind-kissed against the sky and blushing waving bye to migrant birds above but somersaulted to dark beds below where drained of color, crushed, crumpled they lie and wait for emptying’s reward of being taken in God’s store of wet and sturdy ground where ground to time they up again will rise through vaulting pores and veins to be greeted in some spring by birds returned and the over-joyed weeping of the skies. So wait. Wait on the wood leafless and nude like Adam and Eve before they fell. Wait for them awakening.

Meaning is the  sine qua non  of language. It may be surprising, then, that scientists currently lack a complete theory of meaning,  and that semantics remains a kind of "Wild West" of linguistic theory. Even more than syntax, semantics is full of rival approaches, and continued disagreement prevails, even about the basic question of what meaning is, or how it is to be defined. That such questions have remained in the domain of philosophy since the time of Aristotle is a testament to their difficulty: meaning can still be seen as the most important unsolved problem in the cognitive sciences.  W. Tecumseh Fitch.  THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE . (Cambridge University Press, 2010). p. 119.

Courses from December through January