This chapter addresses the topic of legacy and its relevance in the work of Pablo Neruda. Thus, starting from the rescue of 2,000 refugees from the Spanish Civil War on the steamship Winnipeg, it explores the relationship of the Spanish language with death in poems from Residencia en la tierra, and its re-emergence in Canto general, exemplified in “Alturas de Macchu Picchu.” The essay argues that the writing of this poem implies the reconciliation of the Spanish language, which is marked by the violence of its imposition in the Americas, with its speakers. It also looks at the relationship between Nerudian poetry and César Vallejo, who, in España, aparte de mí este cáliz, saw in each letter of the imposed language the origin of punishment, thus making reconciliation impossible. Returning to the Winnipeg, the essay concludes that the legacy of Pablo Neruda’s work is immeasurable because it is a debt, that which our time has with his poetry.

This introductory chapter details the purpose of the collection and its structure. This collection presents the state-of-the-art research in applied linguistics directly relevant to procedural and administrative law and practice, with an emphasis on how legal procedure is constructed, negotiated and implemented through language. Covering the themes around legal process and legal profession through the lens of linguistics, the focus of this collection is very firmly on the applicability of linguistic theory and methodology to the context of legal practice. The Introduction also outlines the chapters, which draw on distinct methods and data types to explore diverse aspects of professional practice across a number of jurisdictions. In doing so, the chapter highlights the immense potential for incorporating linguistic insights into the legal process and the benefits it can bring to law researchers and practitioners.

This chapter builds on Chapter 2 by explaining the etymologies of the complainant parents’ vernacular normative convictions – centring on Ubu-Ntu – that were woefully misunderstood and dismissed by the court in Komape. Thus, using language to uncover the self-conception and values of pre-colonial southern Africans, such as relational personhood and social organization, it explores how decolonising ‘the common law’ by recognising the Komape family’s world-sense requires focusing on the indigenous intellectual roots of the Ntu. It argues that these offer alter-Native ways of understanding concepts, challenging dominant European frameworks and (il)legalities. The analysis draws from ethnographic constitutional research and the sociolinguistic record, aiming to recover neglected histories of indigenous peoples’ identities and normative frameworks, often oversimplified as ‘customary law’, that still influence contemporary legal norms and social orders. Reclaiming indigenous ways of being and knowing, it highlights the often-muted gendered aspects of indigenous intellectual histories that would contribute to a more holistic understanding of social justice. Ultimately, the chapter calls for rethinking South African constitutionalism beyond Euro-American conceptions thereof, focusing on Ntu legalities and intellectual traditions. This offers a pathway to justice rooted in vernacular perspectives, which remain critical to addressing contemporary socio-legal challenges, as exemplified by the Komape case.

Both of the two main Hellenistic philosophical schools, the Epicureans and the Stoics, can be said to have an explicit theory of concepts that is broadly speaking empiricist. For both of them assume that all concepts originate in experience and that none are innate. But while their respective accounts appear similar, they arise from contrasting worldviews: atomist materialism for the Epicureans, and corporealism and a belief in providence and the all-pervading logos of God for the Stoics. Our chapter aims to piece together these two accounts of concepts and interpret them afresh. We will explore their commonalities and differences, show how they are impacted by the respective philosophical frameworks to which each of them belongs, and highlight their philosophical value.

The newcomer to James will meet a philosopher whose language is bracingly lucid. For scholars of James however, this seeming virtue has presented itself as a kind of puzzle: In this context, James has often been faulted for his clarity – for a poetics that contradicts and even seems to undermine the key linguistic tenets of his own work. Those who admire James’s language may encounter a contrary problem: As teachers of James well know, despite his seeming legibility, his writing is apt to be misunderstood – easily reduced and simplified, his ideas taken in just the wrong way. This chapter recasts James’s stylistic choices in light of his early work on perceptual psychology, restoring his use of demonstration, diagram and self-experiment to an account of his rhetorical strategy – one that pertains across his long life of writing. Reading James at this angle resolves many of the seemingly difficult or even paradoxical parts of his thought: The assertion that “the world stands really malleable,” that the “absolute cannot be impossible,” that objects of experience may be taken “twice over,” and even the meaning of “conversion” itself. Understanding the ways in which James used the material at hand to reach his audience opens his work to more immediate, everyday use, while also modeling a mode of interpretation that makes “vague and inarticulate” effects in literature and art available to collective interrogation. Though James did not propose an overarching theory of the aesthetic, approaching James in this way shows the practice of interpretation to be central to the practice of pragmatism, as lived and experienced on a daily basis.

This coda takes the form of a sample judgment that rewrites Baron and Others v Claytile (Pty) Limited and Another [2017] to tangibly illustrate the promise of Alter-Native Constitutionalism. Contrasted with the real-life judgment issued by the Constitutional Court, which relied on liberal approaches, the Alter-Native ‘judgment’ gives willing courts the necessary tools to enforce the ‘property’ rights of ‘non-owners’ and thus highlights the opportunities for equitable solutions the Court has missed, including in its real-life judgment. Emphasizing the importance of robustly applying Ubu-Ntu (rather than the insipid ‘ubuntu’ that scholars and the Court have substituted for it) and applying Ntu Constitutionalism’s jurisprudential framework for constitutional and statutory interpretation developed earlier in the book, the opinion demonstrates existing possibilities for recognising shared rights and promoting housing as a relational, spatiotemporal ‘existence’. By reinterpreting constitutional and legislative provisions to respect indigenous onto-epistemological perspectives on land-as-housing, the Alter-Native opinion demonstrates a transformative approach to ‘property law’ that inherently critiques the Constitutional Court’s interpretation of the ‘property’ and ‘housing’ clauses largely to the exclusion of vernacular law. This Alter-Native opinion thus presents a literally embodied argument for the need for broadening restitution, addressing both enduring injustices and future possibilities over multiple generations.

William James has a complex and intriguing relationship to aesthetics. Although he is the classical pragmatist who had the deepest relationship to the arts, James never devoted a book or an academic article to aesthetic theory. He intentionally refrained from this not only because of his disappointments in reading the texts of philosophical aesthetics but also because of what he perceived as the inherent limits of aesthetic theory. Notwithstanding these severe reservations, James gave aesthetic principles a pervasive and important place in his philosophy. This paper examines both James’s reservations about aesthetic theory and the various significant roles he grants to aesthetic principles in his theories of knowledge, action, ethics, and affective life. One of the key problems James saw in aesthetic theory results from the way it inevitably comes up against the generality and limits of language. This is particularly true with respect to the language of theory. This chapter provides a detailed examination of this issue and its consequences.

This chapter is concerned with the decline of Greek and Roman poetry and the rise of European culture in the Middle Ages. The decisive difference between the ancients and the moderns concerns poetry in the widest sense, that is, the culture of beauty. A number of fragments address this difference. The significance of Christian hymns and the Psalms for the European nations is discussed, with particular attention to national traditions in music, language, and the sciences. A distinction is made between the way the northern and southern European traditions use tone and alliteration. The culture of Arabic is seen as a strong influence on the culture of medieval Europe, passing through Spain by way of the troubadours. The difficulties in defining national character or national poetry are discussed, and the value of medieval poetic arts in Europe is described as an awakening of independent thinking and unencumbered judgement. This makes the medieval poetic arts of Europe a gay science, an expansion of the fields of science, and a general unification of the nations.

That the Declaration of Independence could be considered from the perspective of rhetoric might seem rather obvious, if not downright self-evident. Even so, appreciating how Jefferson thought about language not as an abstract concept but as a lived and material practice can help us appreciate the text of the Declaration from different perspectives. The text is shot through with the histories of race, nation, empire, and belonging that characterized the ideology of American revolutionary republicanism, and with Jefferson’s thinking about these forces and his own anxious place in them. In fact, despite and perhaps even in part because of his own difficulties with public speaking, Jefferson thought about the ability to access and marshal rhetorical exemplars and put them to use in legal and political argument as an elemental part of what it meant to be an effective citizen. His thinking about material rhetoric, about the absorption of what one read through notes, commentary, and commonplace books, turns out to be a critical component of how he thought about the legitimacy of the American project and of how he framed that project in successive drafts of the Declaration itself.

This chapter discusses the work of twelfth-century theologians in Paris who laid the foundations for the development of theology as a discipline in the university. These thinkers explored the characteristics and limits of the discourse on God in theological treatises and summae, which employed increasingly sophisticated technical terminology drawn in part from grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

A detailed commentary which covers matters of literary and historical interest in book VII in the context of Herodotos’ History as a whole. Issues treated include style, dialect, language, text (where necessary), political, religious and social history, both Greek and Persian, prosopography, ethnicity and geography.

This chapter establishes that the Gospel and Epistles of John do not share a common author, highlighting differences in their reception histories, linguistic features, and ideas.

The chapter examines the extensive parallels between the Gospel and Epistles of John, concluding that these connections result from deliberate literary borrowing. It also presents evidence that each of these works was written by a different author and that they were written in the following order: John, 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John.