Table of contents
Acknowledgements
VII
Introduction
1
Chapter 1.Deafness as deficiency
17
Deafness and the “deficiency paradigm”
17
Historical excursion: Hobbes
20
Deafness in the context of 18th-century philosophy: Condillac’s theory of knowledge and the deaf of Chartres
24
Chapter 2.Deafness as deficiency continued: The “Wild Child” in the 18th century as a conceptual twin of the deaf person
35
Condillac’s and Rousseau’s view of wild children
35
Itard’s view of deafness in Treatise on the Maladies of the Ear and of Hearing
39
Concepts of language and the education of Victor
43
Chapter 3.Deafness as difference
55
Deafness, norm and normativity
55
Historical excursion: St. Augustine
61
18th-century empiricism and deaf education
68
Chapter 4.Deafness as difference continued: Pierre Desloges’s account of signing from a signer’s perspective and Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Deaf and Dumb
77
Pierre Desloges
77
Diderot’s Letter on the Deaf and Dumb: General background
82
Gestures without speech
85
Diderot’s view of deafness and sign language
93
Chapter 5.The origins of language
101
Historical excursion: Lucretius
102
The natural origin of language in De Rerum Natura
102
Lucretius’s view of language and animal communication as interpreted in Montaigne
106
The problem of human-animal continuity in Lucretius and in discussions today
108
Lucretius and the nomothetic theory of language origin
111
The 18th century: Rousseau and Condillac
113
Condillac’s Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge
115
Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality
121
Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Language
127
Rousseau’s Émile
131
Later developments with regard to sign language
136
Bébian: Sign language of the deaf as a surviving form of the language of action
137
Edward Tylor’s view of sign language
142
Chapter 6.Conclusion
149
Bibliography
155
Index
163
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