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[This content is not available in "Englisch" yet] Hansjakob Seiler

In his article „Reflections on Hansjakob Seiler’s continuum“ the French mathematician and philosopher René Thom writes the following:

„Finally we recognize that H. Seiler’s continuum is the only known way forward in the education of physical mechanisms permitting us to classify real objects linguistically. I believe this brings in the problem of schematism, famous since Kant: how to form a representative image of a concept (the prototypical referent, as we say today). In his Philosophy of Grammar, O. Jespersen uses as an epigraph Jean-Jaques Rousseau’s maxim: ‚It takes a great deal of philosophy to perceive once what we see around us all the time.‘ From this point of view H. Seiler certainly deserves, beside the title of a great linguist that his work on the Cologne UNITYP project obviously merits, the title of great philosopher“


Thom, René. 1994. Reflections on Hansjakob Seiler’s continuum. In Catherine Fuchs & Bernard Victorri (eds.), Continuity in Linguistic Semantics, 155-187. Linguisticae Investigationes, supplementa; vol. 19. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

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