2012 Program
Event #4
Andrea Moro
I speak, therefore I am Like the starry sky: visions of language across the centuries
Explaining the history of language is like watching the starry sky: we join together the brightest stars and build constellations—some of them ordinary, others more daring. And not all the stars we see are active: the light that reaches us is ancient, it could still be on its way when the star is already dead. Thus the sky is like a natural history museum and at the same time like a zoo: next to the living animals, we see the footprints of those that have become extinct. The same thing happens when we examine how language has been viewed across the centuries: every era, every culture have set forth a dominant theory of the nature of language, so much so that by tracing their development we can obtain a sample of the “spirit of the times”, or a sort of history of mankind.
Andrea Moro, Professor of General Linguistics at the Scuola Univestitaria Superiore IUSS of Pavia, studies the link between human languages structure and the brain. He has been visiting scientist at the MIT and at Harvard University. He is member of the Accademia Pontificia di Arti e Lettere. Planning artificial grammars, he showed that language rules are not just arbitrary conventions but are restricted by the neurobiological architecture of the brain. He published essays in various languages, among them Breve storia del verbo essere (Adelphi, 2006) and Le lingue impossibili (Cortina, 2017). He also debut in fiction with the novel Il segreto di Pietramala (La nave di Teseo, 2018) with which he won the Flaiano Award. At the end of August he will publish the essay La razza e la lingua. Sei lezioni contro il razzismo (La nave di Teseo).
Event #3
Anna Salvo
Sorrow is like a telescope that helps us look into the distance: creatività and suffering
Event #4
Andrea Moro
I speak, therefore I am Like the starry sky: visions of language across the centuries
Event #28
Mauro Agnoletti, Ilaria Borletti Buitoni
Culture, environment, landscape. For a possible, sustainable future
