{"id":162,"date":"2012-03-11T23:52:15","date_gmt":"2012-03-12T04:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/?p=162"},"modified":"2020-01-01T20:43:40","modified_gmt":"2020-01-02T02:43:40","slug":"the-soul-of-a-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/2012\/03\/11\/the-soul-of-a-word\/","title":{"rendered":"The Soul of a word"},"content":{"rendered":"

“A word’s force consists in its meaning.\u00a0 Without the latter it is empty, useless, and (so to speak) dead.\u00a0 Just as the soul animates the body, so, in a way, meaning breathes life into a word. Those whose words lack sense are ‘beating the air,’ rather than [really] speaking.” John of Salisbury, Metalogicon<\/em>, Book II, Chap. 4, trans. Daniel D. McGarry (Philadelphia, 2009), p. 81.<\/p>\n

In this section the twelfth-century writer and churchman, John, discusses the relationship between grammar and dialectic (defined as a subset of logic).\u00a0 While grammar examines\u00a0the use of\u00a0words, dialectic analyzes the meaning behind those words.\u00a0 John’s\u00a0analogy of the soul\/body relationship to word\/meaning fascinates me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“A word’s force consists in its meaning.\u00a0 Without the latter it is empty, useless, and (so to speak) dead.\u00a0 Just as the soul animates the body, so, in a way, meaning breathes life into a word. Those whose words lack … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,21,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-of-salisbury","category-reading","category-trivium"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2265,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162\/revisions\/2265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}