In the attempt to make good one of the desiderata in Bacon'sAdvancement of Learning, a cohort of seventeenth-centuryphilosophers, scientists, schoolmasters, clergymen and virtuosiattempted to devise artificial languages that would immediatelyrepresent the order of thought. This was believed directly torepresent the order of things and to be a universal characteristicof the human mind. Language, Mind and Nature is a 2007 text whichfully reconstructs this artificial language movement. In so doing,it reveals a great deal about the beliefs and activities of thosewho sought to reform learning in seventeenth-century England.Artificial languages straddle occult, religious andproto-scientific approaches to representation and communication,and suggest that much of the so-called 'new philosophy' was notvery new at all. This study broke important ground within itsfield, and will interest anyone concerned with early modernintellectual history or with the history of linguistic thought ingeneral.
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