Selected Papers on Language and the Brain

Philosophers of science work not only with the methods of the sciences but with their contents as well. Substantive issues concerning the relation between mind and matter, between the material basis and the functions of cognition, have been central within the entire history of philosophy. We recall such philosophers as Aristotle, Descartes, the early Kant, Ernst Mach, and the early William James as directly inquiring of the organs and structures of thinking. Science and its philosophical self-criticism are especially and deeply united in the effort to understand the biological brain and human behavior, and so it requires no apology to include this collection of clinical studies among Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. The work of Dr. Norman Geschwind, well represented in this selection, explores the relation between structure and function, between the anatomy of the brain and the 'higher' behavior of men and women. As a clinical neurologist, Geschwind was led to these studies particularly by his in­ terest in those pathologies which have to do with human perception and language. His research into the anatomical substrates of specific dis­ orders-and strikingly the aphasias -present a fascinating and provocative examination of fundamental questions which will concern not neurologists alone but also psychologists, physicians, linguists, speech pathologists, educators, anthropologists, historians of medicine, and philosophers, among others, namely all those interested in the characteristic modes of human activity, in speech, in perception, and in the learning process generally.

Inhalt

I/The Anatomy of Acquired Disorders of Reading (1962).- II/Random Reports: Human Split-Brain Syndromes (1962).- III/A Human Cerebral Deconnection Syndrome (1962).- IV/Carl Wernicke, the Breslau School and the History of Aphasia (1963).- V/The Paradoxical Position of Kurt Goldstein in the History of Aphasia (1964).- VI/Non-Aphasic Disorders of Speech (1964).- VII/The Development of the Brain and the Evolution of Language (1964).- VIII/Disconnexion Syndromes in Animals and Man (1965).- IX/Color-Naming Defects in Association with Alexia (1966).- X/Language-Induced Epilepsy (1967).- XI/The Varieties of Naming Errors (1967).- XII/Wernicke's Contribution to the Study of Aphasia (1967).- XIII/Shrinking Retrograde Amnesia (1967).- XIV/The Apraxias (1967).- XV/Dichotic Listening in Man after Section of Neocortical Commissures (1968).- XVI/Isolation of the Speech Area (1968).- XVII/Human Brain: Left-Right Asymmetries in Temporal Speech Region (1968).- XVIII/Developmental Gerstmann Syndrome (1969).- XIX/The Alexias (1969).- XX/Problems in the Anatomical Understanding of the Aphasias (1969).- XXI/The Organization of Language and the Brain (1970).- XXII/Disorders of Higher Cortical Function in Children (1972).- XXIII/Writing Disturbances in Acute Confusional States (1972).- XXIV/A Review: Traumatic Aphasia by A. R. Luria (1972).- XXV/Conduction Aphasia. (1973).- XXVI/Apraxia and Agraphia in a Left-Hander (1973).- Index of Names.