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The German linguist and mythologist Heymann Steinthal (1823–99) taught at the University of Berlin (today Humboldt-University Berlin) and was especially engaged with Wilhelm von Humboldt and his linguistic works. He was a co-founder of the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory). This innovatory volume, published in 1855, draws a connection between the disciplines of linguistics and psychology, and further relates them to the issue of logic. The three parts of the book deal with the nature of grammar, its relation to logic and the connection of grammar and linguistics to cognitive behaviour. Finally Steinthal discusses the idea of linguistics as ethnopsychology. Pursuing this concept, he, with his brother-in-law Moritz Lazarus, co-founded the journal Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Journal for Ethnopsychology and Linguistics) in 1860, thus laying the foundations for a promising new area of research.
Heymann Steinthal (1823–99) was a German philologist and university professor who insisted that the development of linguistics could be properly understood only when viewed within a general cultural and philosophical framework. Initially an admirer of Wilhelm von Humboldt, he increasingly found more value in the works of fellow philologist August Böckh, to whom this 1863 work is dedicated. In this history of linguistics, Steinthal explores the concept of language in the Greek and Roman traditions, with special emphasis on the relationship to logic. The work is divided into two parts: in the first part, the author accounts for the nature of language in the philosophy of Plato, the Sophists and the Stoics; in the second part, he focuses on how grammar has developed since the Alexandrian school. Steinthal readily admits that Socratic irony and Aristotelian analytics are not simple concepts and warns against misrepresenting them by applying a contemporary interpretation.